Darryl Gove's blog

Outline of book for Solaris developers

It's probably useful to outline the contents of the book I'm working on. The book is meant as a resource for people coding for or on the Solaris platform, for either SPARC or x85/x64 processors. It falls into four main sections:

• Hardware. Solaris is supported on both x86/x64 and SPARC. Both processor families have different features and different assembly languages. But there's also a lot of commonality in processors (e.g. Caches, TLBs etc.). The first section of the book outlines common features of processors, and also the differences between the two families. It also covers particular implementations of the families (e.g. UltraSPARC T1 etc.) All this material is useful context and definitions for the material that follows later.
• Software. The software is Solaris and the tools that ship with it, the Sun Studio compilers, the performance profiling tools, and the debugging tools. In fact, there are tools for most questions that a developer could think of asking, the trick is to know that they exist and have some examples that demonstrate the use of the tools.
• Source code. Inevitably much of what the developer deals with is source code, and this section demonstrates how to use the available tools to identify, tune, and improve source code. The section has coverage of the topic of using performance counters to determine what's causing performance bottlenecks, and also of deriving metrics using performance counters. The section also covers using compiler options and source code modifications to improve performance.
• Multi-core. Almost all systems that are available today have more than one core. The challenge going forwards is to utilise these resources effectively and efficiently. This section focuses on the various approaches that can be used to leverage these resources, and the tools that can be used to diagnose and improve the code.

Posted at 09:05AM Aug 02, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |