Solaris 10

DTrace: Solaris Dynamic Tracing

Resources

DTrace Documentation
DTrace Community
DTrace Toolkit: A collection of DTrace scripts which provides lots of answers and they're a great stepping stone to develop custom scripts
Presentations
- Advanced DTrace: Tips, Tricks and Gotchas from Bryan Cantrill, Mike Shapiro, Adam Leventhal
- DTrace; Finding the Light Where There Was Only Darkness by Jim Mauro: The mother of all DTrace presentations
Tutorial
- Observing and Optimizing your Application with Dtrace, a 200 minutes tutorial from the DTrace czar Angelo Rajadurai.

Running very large DTrace Scripts

DTrace scripts may reject to work when you try to run very large scripts with hundreds of enablings or thousands of actions.

Error message:

dtrace: failed to enable './myDtraceProbe.d'' : DIF program exceeds maximum program size

Reason: The current default size for DTrace is 256K. This may be to small for some probes.

Solution 1: Increase the default size in file /etc/system. You will require to have root privileges.

set dtrace:dtrace_dof_maxsize=0x800000

Reboot the system after the change.

Disclaimer: Changes to the /etc/system file change the behavior of the entire system. Consult your system administrator upfront!

Solution 2: Set the parameter dynamically with mdb (Solaris Modular Debugger)

# mdb -kw

Loading modules: [ ... ]
> dtrace_dof_maxsize/E
dtrace_dof_maxsize:
dtrace_dof_maxsize: 262144
> dtrace_dof_maxsize/Z 0t524288
dtrace_dof_maxsize: 0x40000 = 0x80000
> dtrace_dof_max_size/E
dtrace_dof_maxsize:
dtrace_dof_maxsize: 524288

Disclaimer: Work with mdb is the equivalent to open heart surgery on your Solaris system. Any change has direct and system wide impact. Consider to use a /etc/system entry (see solution 1) and a reboot instead of.

Solaris Autoregistration (S10 9/10)

The new Solaris update release Solaris 10 9/10 is out. The product ships with Oracle branding and licensing and it has a new feature the "autoregistration".

I used to Virtualbox sandbox to figure out what the impact the auto registration has on a text based upgrade and and a GUI based fresh installation. Some example of the regadm command and the related service can be found at the end.

Upgrade with Text Installer

The first thing I was was a text based upgrade of an existing vanilla installation of Solaris 10 on x64. The first change it that the installer asks you to to optionally register my support information.

I have chosen this option. The next thing it wants to know is

Oracle support user
related pass word
potential proxy information for the phone home capability

The next steps follow as usual. The installer performs a patch analysis.

It'll be able to remove 69 patches in my case and downgrade one

The patches in question are listed below

Patch 121781 will get downgraded

Voila, my system got upgraded a good hour later.

GUI Installation

The next thing I tried was a fresh GUI based install. The invitation to use the auto registration looks as follows:

The same information is getting gathered as before.

A summary screen shows the data gathered:

The alternative is to to register anonymously. I left all fields blank. The summary looked in this case like:

regadm Command and autoreg Service

Once the system is up and running you'll find out that you got a new buddy the service autoreg will will call home to Oracle from time to time...

bash-3.00# svcs -l  svc:/application/autoreg:default
fmri         svc:/application/autoreg:default
name         Solaris Auto Registration
enabled      true
state        online
next_state   none
state_time   Sat Sep 11 12:40:23 2010
logfile      /var/svc/log/application-autoreg:default.log
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local:default (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/network/service (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/milestone/name-services (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/milestone/multi-user-server (online)
dependency   optional_all/none svc:/application/stosreg (online)

The registration can then be managed through the new regadm command

An anonymous registration looks as follows:

bash-3.00# regadm register
Registering with My Oracle Support using username     Registered Solaris 10 Operating System    Registered StarOffice 8 Office Suite Update 11    Registered StarOffice 8 Office Suite Update 11 Registration successful

The registration service can be enable, disabled and checked thorigh the regadm command as well.

bash-3.00# regadm status
Solaris Auto-Registration is currently online
bash-3.00# regadm disable
bash-3.00# regadm status
Solaris Auto-Registration is currently disabled
bash-3.00# regadm enable
bash-3.00# regadm status
Solaris Auto-Registration is currently online

More information can be found in the Oracle online documentation.