Friday August 04, 2006

DTrace, MDB: Solaris Internals Podcast

During Jim's recent west coast tour, we were apparently overheard talking in the local about Solaris Internals. Catch the Podcast here, or the raw mp3 here.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Wednesday July 26, 2006

Fun at the OpenSolaris Users Group last night

Jim and I had fun at last nights Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group. We finally met a few more great OpenSolaris community members, including Ben Rockwood, who has blogged about the meeting already! We ran a quiz and gave away a set of signed books too.

I just posted the slides we used to talk about the book here, for reference.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Wednesday July 19, 2006

Solaris Internals Released!

I'm very happy to be finally able to say that Solaris Internals is shipping! I received a box from the same batch that went to Amazon this week, and Amazon have updated their status to available.

We expect the 2nd book (Solaris Performance and Tools) to ship next week.

Also, we've started creating a Peformance FAQ for the 2nd book. It's in early stages right now, but growing quickly.

On a final note, Jim and I hope to do a talk about the books at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris Users Group next week in Santa Clara; hope to see you there!

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Monday April 03, 2006

Performance, Observability, DTrace and MDB

Solaris Internals, 2nd Edition is finally done!

At 5:30am this morning, Jim, I and Brendan Gregg submitted two completed books to the publisher. You may notice two easter eggs here; first there are now TWO books, and there is another primary author in the fold - Brendan Gregg.

The first of the two books is an update to Solaris Internals, for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris. It covers Virtual Memory, File systems, Zones, Resource Management, Process Rights etc (all the good stuff in S10). This book is about 1100 pages.

The TOC for this book is here

The second book is aimed at Administrators to learn about performance and debugging. It's basically the book to read to understand and learn DTrace, MDB and the Solaris Performance tools, and a methodology for performance observability and debugging. This book is about 550 pages.

The TOC for this book is here

We need your help to name the two books. The current proposals are:

• Solaris Internals: Kernel Architecture for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris
• Solaris Performance and Tools: Performance Measurement and Debugging with DTrace and MDB

We would very much like to hear your thoughts on what you feel would be great titles and subtitles for the books.

We welcome and look forward to your thoughts on the titles!

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Friday August 26, 2005

Least Privilege Chapter done

This week I completed a draft of the Least Privilege chapter, based on some technical content from Casper Dik. It's added about 40 pages to the book. Darren Moffat is working on a complementary chapter on the Solaris 10 crypto framework too, so this edition will have a Security section...

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris ]

Friday July 08, 2005

Solaris Internals: 2nd Edition!

It's no secret that we hope to get an updated Solaris Internals book out. Jim and I have had this AI on our desk for a while. The good news is that it's been making quite a bit of progress of late!

The idea is to update the existing book from Solaris 7 to Solaris 10, highly leveraging OpenSolaris, DTrace and mdb. There's a lot to add, given the onslaught of development: substantially revised virtual memory, a new file system interface, a new threads model, zones, ZFS, Least privilege, SMF and the list goes on. We scoped adding all of this, and we'd have a 2000+ page book when we're done.

What we've decided to do is break up the work into smaller deliverable chunks, and deliver it in parts. Yes, we're taking the Knuth approach: Solaris 10 Internals will have more than one volume. We're splitting some of the new material and most of the performance discussion out into the subsequent volume. We're enlisting a few helpers for the subsequent volume, to make it more of a community effort.

So that you can keep the pressure on us, I thought I'd share where we are with the current volume. Our target is to be done with this volume in the next couple of months.

Part	Chapter	Primary	Old pages	Target pages	Left
	Preface	JM	6	7	2
I – Intro	Introduction	Phil Harman/JM	36	40	10
Running Page Total
782
II – Tools	Introduction	JM	2	2	2
	Dtrace	Jon	0	30	5
	MDB	RMC	5	5	5
	Kstat	Boothby/RMC	0	15	0
III – Memory	VM Intro	RMC	6	6	0
	VM Monitoring	RMC	44	44	0
	Large pages	RMC	14	14	0
	Memory Arch	RMC	36	36	0
	Physical Mem Mngmnt	RMC	20	20	0
	HAT	Tariq	12	20	7
	Kernel Memory	RMC	48	48	0
IV – Platform	Sync Intro	JM	16	16	5
	Sync Impl	JM	16	16	4
	NUMA/CMT	RMC/Saxe/Chew	16	18	4
	Kernel Services	JM	37	38	20
	Kernel Modules & Linker	JM	0	20	20
V – Process Model	Process Model	JM	48	48	20
	Sched Classes & Disp	JM	65	50	40
	ProcFS	JM	22	22	6
	Signals	JM	18	20	10
	Resource Management	JM	8	20	12
	IPC	JM	48	48	10
VI – Files & File Systems	Files	RMC	40	40	4
	Intro	RMC	18	22	6
	FS Architecture	RMC	46	70	0
	UFS	Shawn	24	30	6
	NFS	Spencer/Sameer	0	30	0
	ZFS	RMC	20	0	20
Appendix A	ELF File Format	JM	12	12	12
Appendix B	Kernel Maps	RMC	12	12	0
				819	260

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( Jul 08 2005, 05:45:47 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [11]