I will demonstrate the power of mdb(1) by displaying kernel data structures related to virtual memory (VM) in order to show how to dump the contents of any running application's memory or any page of memory in general. As an example I will run a simple shell script that I will end up locating in the shell's heap. When I first figured out this example, it was an educated guess on my part that a shell script would end up in the heap of the shell interpreter. The file name of an interpreter script (files starting with #!) gets passed to the invoked interpreter as one of its arguments.
Virtualization is the big buzz word these days. I would like to describe one of the older virtualization techniques around: Virtual Memory (VM) on Solaris 10. Every 32-bit application, command, utility (e.g. ls, vi, fmd, acroread, oracle process, etc) is given 2 to the 32 = 4Gb of virtual memory to potentially use. 64-bit applications are given 16 Exabytes of virtual memory which is 4 billion times more than 32-bit programs.
Ijoined Forsythe to be able to work closely with a person whose name kept popping up every time I taught a DTrace class for SunEd. A customer in the class would say oh yea Jarod Jenson was here last week or last month and he solved our performance problem in less than a day. I wrote the DTrace course (SA-327-S10) for Sun Educational Services starting in March of 2004 and then taught it for 3 plus years (as well as Solaris 10 Internals, Multi-threaded Programming and Crash Dump Analysis) before joining Forsythe.
