Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture

by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro

Overview

"The Solaris™Internals volumes are simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of the Solaris (and OpenSolaris) Operating Environment. Any person using Solaris--in any capacity--would be remiss not to include these two new volumes in their personal library. With advanced observability tools in Solaris (likeDTrace), you will more often find yourself in what was previously unchartable territory. Solaris™ Internals, Second Edition, provides us a fantastic means to be able to quickly understand these systems and further explore the Solaris architecture--especially when coupled with OpenSolaris source availability."

--Jarod Jenson, chief systems architect, Aeysis

"The Solaris™ Internals volumes by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall must be on your bookshelf if you are interested in in-depth knowledge of Solaris operating system internals and architecture. As a senior Unix engineer for many years, I found the first edition of Solaris™ Internals the only fully comprehensive source for kernel developers, systems programmers, and systems administrators. The new second edition, with the companion performance and debugging book, is an indispensable reference set, containing many useful and practical explanations of Solaris and its underlying subsystems, including tools and methods for observing and analyzing any system running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris."

--Marc Strahl, senior UNIX engineer

Solaris™ Internals, Second Edition, describes the algorithms and data structures of all the major subsystems in the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris kernels. The text has been extensively revised since the first edition, with more than 600 pages of new material. Integrated Solaris tools and utilities, including DTrace, MDB, kstat, and the process tools, are used throughout to illustrate how the reader can observe the Solaris kernel in action. The companion volume, Solaris™ Performance and Tools, extends the examples contained here, and expands the scope to performance and behavior analysis. Coverage includes:

• Virtual and physical memory
• Processes, threads, and scheduling
• File system framework and UFS implementation
• Networking: TCP/IP implementation
• Resource management facilities and zones

The Solaris™ Internals volumes make a superb reference for anyone using Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780132715744
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	07/10/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1408
File size:	36 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Richard McDougall is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, specializing in operating systems technology and systems performance.

Jim Mauro is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance, Architecture, and Applications Engineering group at Sun Microsystems, where his most recent efforts have focused on Solaris performance on Opteron platforms.

Table of Contents

Foreword xxvii Preface xxix About the Authors xxxvii Acknowledgments xxxix Part One: Introduction to Solaris Internals 1 Chapter 1: Introduction 3

1.1 Key Features of Solaris 10, Solaris 9, and Solaris 8 4

1.2 Key Differentiators 12

1.3 Kernel Overview 15

1.4 Processes, Threads, and Scheduling 18

1.5 Interprocess Communication 23

1.6 Signals 25

1.7 Memory Management 26

1.8 Files and File Systems 29

1.9 Resource Management 30

Part Two: The Process Model 41 Chapter 2: The Solaris Process Model 43

2.1 Components of a Process 44

2.2 Process Model Evolution 48

2.3 Executable Objects 52

2.4 Process Structures 55

2.5 Kernel Process Table 79

2.6 Process Resource Attributes 84

2.7 Process Creation 89

2.8 System Calls 98

2.9 Process Termination 106

2.10 The Process File System 110

2.11 Signals 129

2.12 Sessions and Process Groups 150

2.13 MDB Reference 156

Chapter 3: Scheduling Classes and the Dispatcher 157

3.1 Fundamentals 157

3.2 Processor Abstractions 162

3.3 Dispatcher Queues, Structures, and Variables 171

3.4 Dispatcher Locks 183

3.5 Dispatcher Initialization 190

3.6 Scheduling Classes 192

3.7 Thread Priorities 207

3.8 Dispatcher Functions 234

3.9 Preemption 246

3.10 The Kernel Sleep/Wakeup Facility 253

3.11 Interrupts 262

3.12 Summary 270

3.13 MDB Reference 271

Chapter 4: Interprocess Communication 273

4.1 The System V IPC Framework 274

4.2 System V IPC Resource Controls 282

4.3 Configuring IPC Tuneables on Solaris 10 285

4.4 System V Shared Memory 286

4.5 System V Semaphores 295

4.6 System V Message Queues 299

4.7 POSIX IPC 303

4.8 Solaris Doors 312

4.9 MDB Reference 321

Chapter 5: Process Rights Management 323

5.1 Then and Now 323

5.2 Least Privilege in Solaris 324

5.3 Process Privilege Models 325

5.4 Privilege Awareness: The Details 334

5.5 Least Privilege Interfaces 344

Part Three: Resource Management 365 Chapter 6: Zones 367

6.1 Introduction 367

6.2 Zone Runtime 371

6.3 Booting Zones 375

6.4 Security 379

6.5 Process Model 386

6.6 File Systems 389

6.7 Networking 393

6.8 Devices 398

6.9 Interprocess Communication 405

6.10 Resource Management and Observability 407

6.11 MDB Reference 414

Chapter 7: Projects, Tasks, and Resource Controls 415

7.1 Projects and Tasks Framework 415

7.2 The Project Database 418

7.3 Project and Task APIs 419

7.4 Kernel Infrastructure for Projects and Tasks 420

7.5 Resource Controls 423

7.6 Interfaces for Resource Controls 432

7.7 Kernel Interfaces for Resource Controls 437

Part Four: Memory 445 Chapter 8: Introduction to Solaris Memory 447

8.1 Virtual Memory Primer 447

8.2 Two Levels of Memory 448

8.3 Memory Sharing and Protection 448

8.4 Pages: Basic Units of Physical Memory 448

8.5 Virtual-to-Physical Translation 449

8.6 Physical Memory Management: Paging and Swapping 450

8.7 Virtual Memory as a File System Cache 450

8.8 New Features of the Virtual Memory Implementation 451

Chapter 9: Virtual Memory 455

9.1 Design Overview 455

9.2 Virtual Address Spaces 457

9.3 Tracing the VM System 466

9.4 Virtual Address Space Management 467

9.5 Segment Drivers 476

9.6 Anonymous Memory 485

9.7 The Anonymous Memory Layer 487

9.8 The swapfs Layer 489

9.9 Virtual Memory Watchpoints 492

9.10 Changes to Support Large Pages 494

9.11 MDB Reference 501

Chapter 10: Physical Memory 503

10.1 Physical Memory Allocation 503

10.2 Pages: The Basic Unit of Solaris Memory 506

10.3 The Page Scanner 516

10.4 MDB Reference 525

Chapter 11: Kernel Memory 527

11.1 Kernel Virtual Memory Layout 527

11.2 Kernel Memory Allocation 534

11.3 The Vmem Allocator 552

11.4 Kernel Memory Allocator Tracing 562

11.5 MDB Reference 578

Chapter 12: Hardware Address Translation 581

12.1 HAT Overview 581

12.2 The UltraSPARC HAT Layer 583

12.3 The x64 HAT Layer 625

12.4 MDB Reference 636

Chapter 13: Working with Multiple Page Sizes in Solaris 639

13.1 Determining When to Use Large Pages 639

13.2 Measuring Application Performance 640

13.3 Configuring for Multiple Page Sizes 645

Part Five: File Systems 655 Chapter 14: File System Framework 657

14.1 File System Framework 657

14.2 Process-Level File Abstractions 658

14.3 Solaris File System Framework 668

14.4 File System Modules 672

14.5 The Virtual File System (vfs) Interface 675

14.6 The Vnode 685

14.7 File System I/O 707

14.8 File Systems and Memory Allocation 718

14.9 Path-Name Management 722

14.10 The Directory Name Lookup Cache 726

14.11 The File System Flush Daemon 734

14.12 File System Conversion to Solaris 10 734

14.13 MDB Reference 736

Chapter 15: The UFS File System 737

15.1 UFS Development History 737

15.2 UFS On-Disk Format 739

15.3 The UFS Inode 751

15.4 Access Control in UFS 764

15.5 Extended Attributes in UFS 767

15.6 Locking in UFS 768

15.7 Logging 775

15.8 MDB Reference 790

Part Six: Platform Specifics 793 Chapter 16: Support for NUMA and CMT Hardware 795

16.1 Memory Hierarchy Designs 796

16.2 Memory Placement Optimization Framework 799

16.3 Initial Thread Placement 802

16.4 Scheduling 802

16.5 Memory Allocation 803

16.6 Lgroup Implementation 804

16.7 MPO APIs 807

16.8 Locality Group Hierarchy 811

16.9 MPO Statistics 813

16.10 MDB Reference 814

Chapter 17: Locking and Synchronization 815

17.1 Synchronization 815

17.2 Parallel Systems Architectures 816

17.3 Hardware Considerations for Locks and Synchronization 819

17.4 Introduction to Synchronization Objects 824

17.5 Mutex Locks 827

17.6 Reader/Writer Locks 835

17.7 Turnstiles and Priority Inheritance 840

17.8 Kernel Semaphores 844

17.9 DTrace Lockstat Provider 846

Part Seven: Networking 853 Chapter 18: The Solaris Network Stack 855

18.1 STREAMS and the Network Stack 855

18.2 Solaris 10 Stack: Design Goals 862

18.3 Solaris 10 Network Stack Framework 863

18.4 TCP as an Implementation of the New Framework 870

18.5 UDP 875

18.6 Synchronous STREAMS 878

18.7 IP 880

18.8 Solaris Device Driver Framework 882

18.9 Interrupt Model and NIC Speeds 891

18.10 Summary 895

18.11 MDB Reference 895

Part Eight: Kernel Services 899 Chapter 19: Clocks and Timers 901

19.1 The System Clock Thread 901

19.2 Callouts and Callout Tables 904

19.3 System Time Facilities 910

19.4 The Cyclic Subsystem 912

Chapter 20: Task Queues 927

20.1 Overview of Task Queues 927

20.2 Dynamic Task Queues 928

20.3 Task Queues Kernel Programming Interfaces 932

20.4 Device Driver Interface for Task Queues 934

20.5 Task Queue Observability 935

20.6 Task Queue Implementation Notes 937

Chapter 21: kmdb Implementation 943

21.1 Introduction 943

Appendices 963 Appendix A: Kernel Virtual Address Maps 965 Appendix B: Adding a System Call to Solaris 971 Appendix C: A Sample Procfs Utility 975 Bibliography 979 Index 983