When running Solaris as a guest under VirtualBox it can be difficult to use the "F1-A" trick to drop into the live kernel debugger in that guest. For example, your host window manager probably won't pass that key combination through to VirtualBox or you might be running on a Solaris host with kmdb and don't want to cause the host to drop into kmdb.
So to inject an "F1-A" keypress combination into the guest, use the following command:
VBoxManage controlvm solarisVMname keyboardputscancode 3b 1e 9e bb
where solarisVMname is replaced by the VirtualBox name of your Solaris virtual machine. The hex keyboard scan codes mean:
- 3b press F1
- 1e press A
- 9e release A
- bb release F1
Of course, don't do this while your guest is running X, as kmdb interacts with the plain text console.