Solaris Internals Tutorial Usenix Sessions

Who should attend: Software engineers, application architects and developers, kernel developers, device driver writers, system administrators, performance analysts, capacity planners, Solaris users who wish to know more about the system they're using and the information available from bundled and unbundled tools, and anyone interested in operating system internals.

The installed base of Solaris systems being used for various commercial data-processing applications across all market segments and scientific computing applications has grown dramatically over the last several years, and it continues to grow. As an operating system, Solaris has evolved considerably, with some significant changes made to the UNIX SVR4 source base on which the early system was built. An understanding of how the system works is required in order to design and develop applications that take maximum advantage of the various features of the operating system, to understand the data made available via bundled system utilities, and to optimally configure and tune a Solaris system for a particular application or load.

Topics include the major subsystems of the Solaris 8 kernel. We review the major features of the release and take a look at how the major subsystems are tied together. We cover in detail the implementation of Solaris services (e.g. system calls) and low-level functions, such as synchronization primitives, clocks and timers, and trap and interrupt handling. We discuss the system's memory architecture; the virtual memory model, process address space and kernel address space, and memory allocation. The Solaris process/thread model is discussed, along with the kernel dispatcher and the various scheduling classes implemented and supported. We cover the Virtual File System (VFS) subsystem, the implementation of the Unix File System (UFS), and file IO-related topics.

All topics are covered with an eye to the practical application of the information, such as for performance tuning or software development. Solaris networking (topics related to TCP/IP and STREAMS) is not covered in this course.

After completing this tutorial, participants will have a solid understanding of the internals of the major areas of the Solaris kernel that they will be able to apply to systems performance analysis, tuning, load/ behavior analysis, and application development.

• Conference Information
• September, 2004, Atlanta, Ga (Jim, Richard)
• June 26, 2004, Boston, Ma (Jim, Richard)
• June 7, 2003, San Antonio, Texas (Jim, Richard, Kevin)
• Februry 10-14 2003, Vasteras, Sweden (Richard)
• June 10-15 2002, Monterey, California (Jim, Richard, Kevin)
• June 25-30 2001, Boston, Massachusetts (Jim)
• June 18-23 2000, San Diego, California (Jim, Richard)
• June 6-11 1999, Monterey, California (Jim, Richard)