Solaris™ Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

Foreword

Over the past decade, a regrettable idea took hold: Operating systems, while interesting, were a finished, solved problem. The genesis of this idea is manifold, but the greatest contributing factor may simply be that operating systems were not understood; they were largely delivered not as transparent systems, but rather as proprietary black boxes, welded shut to even the merely curious. This is anathema to understanding; if something can’t be taken apart—if its inner workings remain hidden—its intricacies can never be understood nor its engineering nuances appreciated. This is especially true of software systems, which can’t even be taken apart in the traditional sense. Software is, despite the metaphors, information, not machine, and ...