The Solaris™ Internals Community Authors Although there are only three names on the cover of these books, the effort was truly that of a community effort. Several of our friends went above and beyond the call of duty, and gave generously of their time, expertise, and energy by contributing material to the book. Their efforts significantly improved the content, allowing the books to cover a broader range of topics, as well as giving us a chance to hear from specific subject matter experts. Our sincerest thanks to the following. Frank Batschulat. For help updating the UFS chapter. Frank has been a software engineer for 10 years and has worked at Sun Microsystems for a total of 7 years. At Sun he is a member of the Solaris File Systems Group primarily focused on UFS and the generic VFS/VNODE layer. Russell Blaine. For x86 system call information. Russell Blaine has been juggling various parts of the kernel since joining Sun straight out of Princeton in 2000. Joe Bonasera. For the x64 HAT description. Joe is an engineer in the Solaris kernel group, working mostly on core virtual memory support. Joe's background includes working on optimizing compilers and parallel database engines. His recent efforts have been around the AMD64 port, and porting OpenSolaris to run under the Xen virtualization software, specifically in the areas of virtual and physical memory management, and the boot process. Jeff Bonwick. For a description of the vmem Allocator. Jeff is a Distinguished Engineer in Solaris kernel development. His many contributions include the original kernel memory slab allocator, and updated kernel vmem framework. Jeff's most recent work is the architecture, design, and implementation of the Zetabyte Filesystem, ZFS. Peter Boothby. For the kstats overview. Peter Boothby worked at Sun for 11 years in a variety of roles: Systems Engineer; SAP Competence Centre manager for Australia and New Zealand; Sun's performance engineer and group manager at SAP in Germany; Staff Engineer in Scotland supporting European ISVs in their Solaris and Java development efforts. After a 2-year sabbatical skiing in France, racing yachts on Sydney Harbor, and sailing up and down the east coast of Australia, Peter returned to the Sun fold by founding a consulting firm that assists Sun Australia in large-scale consolidation and integration projects. Rich Brown. For text on the file system interfaces as part of the File System chapters. Rich Brown has worked in the Solaris file system area for10 years. He is currently looking at ways to improve file system observability. Bryan Cantrill. For the overview of the cyclics subsystem. Bryan is a Senior Software Engineer in Solaris kernel engineering. Among Bryan's many contributions are the cyclics subsystem, and interposing on the trap table to gather trap statistics. More recently, Bryan developed Solaris Dynamic Tracing, or DTrace. Jonathan Chew. For help with the dispatcher NUMA and CMT sections. Jonathan Chew has been a software engineer in the Solaris kernel development group at Sun Microsystems since 1995. During that time, he has focused on Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) machines and chip multithreading. Prior to joining Sun, Jonathan was a research systems programmer in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University and the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. Todd Clayton. For information on the large-page architectural changes. Todd is an engineer in Solaris kernel development, where he works on (among other things) the virtual memory code and AMD64 Solaris port. Sankhyayan (Shawn) Debnath. For updating the UFS chapter with Sarah, Frank, Karen, and Dworkin. Sankhyayan Debnath is a student at Purdue University majoring in computer science and was an intern for the file systems group at Sun Microsystems. When not hacking away at code on the computer, you can find him racing his car at the local tracks or riding around town on his motorcycle. Casper Dik. For material that was used to produce the process rights chapter. Casper is an engineer in Solaris kernel development, and has worked extensively in the areas of security and networking. Among Casper's many contributions are the design and implementation of the Solaris 10 Process Rights framework. Andrei Dorofeev. For guidance on the dispatcher chapter. Andrei is a Staff Engineer in the Solaris Kernel Development group at Sun Microsystems. His interests include multiprocessor scheduling, chip multithreading architectures, resource management, and performance. Andrei received an M.S. with honors in computer science from Novosibirsk State University in Russia. Roger Faulkner. For suggestions about the process chapter. Roger is a Senior Staff Engineer in Solaris kernel development. Roger did the original implementation of the process file system for UNIX System V, and his numerous contributions include the threads implementation in Solaris, both past and current, and the unified process model. Brendan Gregg. For significant review contributions and joint work on the performance and debugging volume. Brendan has been using Solaris for around a decade, and has worked as a programmer, a system administrator and a consultant. He is an OpenSolaris contributor, and has written software such as the DTrace toolkit. He teaches Solaris classes for Sun Microsystems. Phil Harman. For the insights and suggestions to the process and thread model descriptions. Phil is an engineer in Solaris kernel development, where he focuses on Solaris kernel performance. Phil's numerous contributions include a generic framework for measuring system call performance called libMicro. Phil is an acknowledged expert on threads and developing multi-threaded applications. Jonathan Haslam. For the DTrace chapter. Jon is an engineer in Sun's performance group, and is an expert in application and system performance. Jon was a very early user of DTrace, and contributed significantly to identifying needed features and enhancements for the final implementation. Stephen Hahn. For original material that is used in the projects, tasks, and resource control chapters. Stephen is an engineer in Solaris kernel development, and has made significant contributions to the kernel scheduling code and resource management implementation, among other things. Sarah Jelinek. For 12 years of software engineering experience, 8 of these at Sun Microsystems. At Sun she has worked on systems management, file system management, and most recently in the file system kernel space in UFS. Sarah holds a B.S. in computer science and applied mathematics, and an M.S. in computer science, both from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Alexander Kolbasov. For the description of task queues. Alexander works in the Solaris Kernel Performance group. Interests include the scheduler, Solaris NUMA implementation, kernel observability, and scalability of algorithms. Tariq Magdon-Ismail. For the updates to the SPARC section of the HAT chapter. Tariq is a Staff Engineer in the Performance, Availability and Architecture Engineering group with over 10 years of Solaris experience. His areas of contribution include large system performance, kernel scalability, and memory management architecture. Tariq was the recipient of the Sun Microsystems Quarterly Excellence Award for his work in the area of memory management. Tariq holds a B.S. with honors in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park. Stuart Maybee. For information on the file system mount table description. Stuart is an engineer in Sun's kernel development group. Dworkin Muller. For information on the UFS on disk format. Dworkin was a UFS file system developer while at Sun. David Powell. For the System V IPC update. Dave is an engineer in Solaris kernel development, and his many contributions include a rewrite of the System V IPC facility to use new resource management framework for setting thresholds, and contributing to the development of the Solaris 10 Service Management Facility (SMF). Karen Rochford. For her contributions and diagrams for UFS logging. Karen Rochford has 15 years of software engineering experience, with her past 3 years being at Sun. Her focus has been in the area of I/O, including device drivers, SCSI, storage controller firmware, RAID, and most recently UFS and NFS. She holds a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. In her spare time, Karen can be found training her dogs, a briard and a bouvier, for obedience and agility competitions. Eric Saxe. For contributions to the dispatcher, NUMA, and CMT chapters. Eric Saxe has been with Sun for 6 years and is a development engineer in the Solaris Kernel Performance Group. When Eric isn't at home with his family, he spends his time analyzing and enhancing the performance of the kernel's scheduling and virtual memory subsystems on NUMA, CMT, and otherwise large system architectures. Eric Schrock. For the system calls appendix. Eric is an engineer in Solaris kernel development. His most recent efforts have been the development and implementation of the Zetabyte File System, ZFS. Michael Shapiro. For contributions on kmem debugging and introductory text for MDB. Mike Shapiro is a Distinguished Engineer and architect for RAS features in Solaris kernel development. He led the effort to design and build the Sun architecture for Predictive Self-Healing, and is the cocreator of DTrace. Mike is the author of the DTrace compiler, D programming language, kernel panic subsystem, fmd(1M), mdb(1M), dumpadm(1M), pgrep(1), pkill(1), and numerous enhancements to the /proc filesystem, core files, crash dumps, and hardware error handling. Mike has been a member of the Solaris kernel team for 9 years and holds an M.S. in computer science from Brown University. Denis Sheahan. For information on Java in the tools chapter. Denis is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Sun Microsystems UltraSPARC T1 Architecture Group. During his 12 years at Sun, Denis has focused on application software and Solaris OS performance, with an emphasis on database, application server, and Java technology products. He is currently working on UltraSPARC T1 performance for current and future products. Denis holds a B.S. degree in computer science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He received the Sun Chairman's Award for innovation in 2003. Tony Shoumack. For contributions to the performance volume, and numerous reviews. Tony has been working with UNIX and Solaris for 12 years and he is an Engineer in Sun's Client Solutions organization where he specializes in commercial applications, databases and high-availability clustered systems. Bart Smaalders. For numerous good ideas, and introductory text in the NUMA chapter. Bart is a Senior Staff Engineer in Solaris kernel development, and spends his time making Solaris faster. Sunay Tripathi. For authoring the networking chapter. Sunay is the Senior Staff Engineer in Solaris Core Technology group. He has designed, developed and led major projects in Sun Solaris for the past 9 years in kernel/network environment to provide new functionality, performance, and scalability. Before coming to Sun, Sunay was a researcher at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, for 4 years and served a 2-year stint at Stanford where he was involved with Center of Design Research, creating smart agents and part of the Mosquito Net group experimenting with mobility in IP networks. Andy Tucker. For the introductory text on zones. Andy has been a Principal Engineer at VMware since 2005, working on the VMware ESX product. Prior to that he spent 11 years at Sun Microsystems working in a variety of areas related to the Solaris Operating System, particularly scheduling, resource management, and virtualization. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1994.
The Reviewers A special thanks to Dave Miller and Dominic Kay, copy-reviewer extraordinaires. Dave and Dominic meticulously reviewed vast amounts of material, and provided detailed feedback and commentary, through all phases of the book's development. The following gave generously of their time and expertise reviewing the manuscripts. They found bugs, offered suggestions and comments that considerably improved the quality of the final workLori Alt, Roch Bourbonnais, Rich Brown, Alan Hargreaves, Ben Humphreys, Dominic Kay, Eric Lowe, Giri Mandalika, Jim Nissen, Anton Rang, Damian Reeves, Marc Strahl, Michael Schuster, Rich Teer, and Moriah Waterland. Tony Shoumack and Allan Packer did an amazing eleventh-hour scramble to help complete the review process and apply several improvements. Personal Acknowledgments from Richard Without a doubt, this book has been a true team collaborationwhen we look through the list, there are actually over 30 authors for this edition. I've enjoyed working with all of you, and now have the pleasure of thanking you for your help to bring these books to life. First I'd like to thank my family, starting with my wife Traci, for your unbelievable support and patience throughout this multiyear project. You kept me focused on getting the job done, and during this time you gave me the wonderful gift of our new son, Boston. My 4-year-old daughter Madison is growing up so fast to be the most amazing little lady. I'm so proud of youand that you've been so interested in this project, and for the artwork you so confidently drew for the cover pages. Yes, Madi, we can finally say the book's done! For our friends and family who have been so patient while I've been somewhat absent. I owe you several years' worth of camping, dinners, and well, all the other social events I should have been at! My co-conspirator in crime, Jim Maurohey, Jim, we did it! Thank you for being such a good friend and keeping me sane all the way through this effort! Thanks, Phil Harman, for being the always-available buddy on the other side of IM to keep me company and bounce numerous ideas off. And of course for the many enjoyable photo-taking adventures. I'd very much like to thank Brendan Gregg for joining in the fold and working jointly on the second volume on performance and tools. Your insights, thoughts, and tools make this volume something that it could not have been without your involvement. Mary Lou Nohr, our copy editor, for whom I have the greatest respectyou had the patience to work with us as this project grew from 700 pages to 1600 and then from one book to two. For completing with incredible detail everything we sent your way, in record time. Without you this book would have not been what it is today. Thank you to the Solaris development team, for the countless innovations that make writing about Solaris so much fun. Thanks to Bart Smaalders, Solaris Kernel performance lead, for the insights, comments, suggestions, and guidance along the way on this and many other projects. To all the guest authors who helped, thanks for contributingyour insights and words bring a welcome completion to this Solaris story. For my colleagues within the Sun Performance, Availability, and Architecture group in Sun. So much of the content of these books is owed to your hard efforts. Thanks to my senior director, Ganesh Ramamurthy, for standing behind this project 100%, and giving us his full support and resources to get the job done.
Richard McDougall
Menlo Park, California
June 2006
Personal Acknowledgments from Jim Thanks a million to Greg Doench, our Senior Editor at Prentice Hall, for waiting an extra two years for the updated edition, and jumping through hoops at the eleventh hour when we handed him two books instead of one. Thanks to Mary Lou Nohr, our copy editor, for doing such an amazing job in record time. My thanks to Brendan Gregg for a remarkable effort, making massive contributions to the performance book, while at the same time providing amazing feedback on the internals text. Marc Strahl deserves special recognition. Marc was a key reviewer for the first edition of Solaris™ Internals (as well as the current edition). In a first edition eleventh-hour scramble, I somehow managed to get the wrong version of the acknowledgements copy in for the final typesetting, and Marc was left out. I truly appreciate his time and support on both editions. Solaris Kernel Engineering. Everyone. All of you. The support and enthusiasm was simply overwhelming, and all while continuing to innovate and create the best operating system on the planet. Thanks a million. My manager, Keng-Tai Ko, for his support, patience, and flexibility, and my senior director, Ganesh Ramamurthy, for incredible support. My good friends Phil Harman and Bob Sneed, for a lot of listening, ideas, and opinions, and pulling me out of the burn-out doldrums many, many times. My good mate Richard McDougall, for friendship, leadership, vision, and one hundred great meals and one thousand glasses of wine in the Bay Area. Looking forward to a lot more. Lastly, my wife Donna, and my two sons, Frank and Dominick, for their love, support, encouragement, and putting up with two-plus years of"I can't. I have to work on the book."
Jim Mauro
Green Brook, New Jersey
June 2006
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