Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

With contributions from Peter Boothby

The Solaris kernel provides a set of functions and data structures for device drivers and other kernel modules to export module-specific statistics to the outside world. This infrastructure, referred to as kstat, provides the following to the Solaris software developer:

• C-language functions for device drivers and other kernel modules to present statistics

• C-language functions for applications to retrieve statistics data from Solaris without needing to directly read kernel memory

• Perl-based command-line program /usr/bin/kstat to access statistics data interactively or in shell scripts (introduced in Solaris 8)

• Perl library interface for constructing custom performance-monitoring utilities