Solaris Interrupts

In this post, I'll be shown you how to access irq table on a Solaris system and how to get statistics about the number of interrupts produced on Solaris. We'll use two commands intrstat and mdb.
intrstat command shows how many interrupts produced by each device and how many of them handled by each cpu on the system. "%tim" column shows the time where spend by that driver's interrupt handler on processing cpu. You can pass a parameter to intrstat and tell it to gather information in given intervals (in seconds). Following is a sample output of intrstat where it gets statistics in 5 seconds interval.

Now, after getting interrupt statistics we can now examine the irq table on Solaris system. For this job, we'll use solaris mdb (Solaris modular debugger). We can access irq table through the kernel. So, we'll pass the "-k" parameter to mdb. This will tell it to get in kernel debugging mode. mdb will use /dev/ksyms and /dev/kmem to access Solaris kernel. After running "mdb -k", type "::interrupts" command to acess irq table in Solaris system. Here is a sample output:

This table shows us which driver(s) (ISR) using which irq. Share column shows how many devices sharing the same irq. IPL gives irq priority. Type column show irq type used Fixed (legacy), MSI, IPI interprocessor interrupt (xcalls - cross call).

disk error statistics with Solaris

Solaris iostat command normally shows you disk activity statistics and cpu utilization information. But it has another useful option which shows you disk error statistics. Those parameters are "-e" and "-E"."-e" options show summary disk error statistics for soft, hard and trasnportation errors. The other option "-E" shows all errors on the disks and information about the devices like the vendor,model,size and media erros.

Stopping and Running process on the fly with Solaris/OpenSolaris

Solaris/OpenSolaris has two utilities called pstop and prun which has ability to stop a running process and run it again. Both of the ulities takes pid or pid/lwp (light weight process - thread) as parameter. As the name says, pstop stops a running process when given an pid of a process. Given the same process id of a stopped process to prun , makes the process runnable again.

Booting OpenSolaris in verbose mode

When OpenSolaris boots it does not show kernel messages on the console by default. You can see them by passing an argument to kernel when booting. OpenSolaris uses grub boot loader. On the grub menu press "e" to enter edit mode.


Move to the line where kernel parameters are written with cursor keys.


Press "e" again for edit mode for the grub. Than add "-v" parameter to the end of kernel parameters.



After adding "-v" verbose parameter to kernel press "enter" and than "b" to boot OpenSolaris with verbose mode enabled.


If you need this option to be permanent, you need to modify grub config file in OpenSolaris. It's located in /boot/grub/menu.lst . If you use zfs root, than it's located in /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst.You can do this on a Sun Sparc machine with Solaris when the openboot procedure begins by pressing "STOP-A" combination and type "boot -v"