Resource Management

Process Information

Many users are familiar with the ps process status command. But the ps command does not provide access to all the information available from the Solaris operating environment. It does provide a common set of data that is generally available on all UNIX systems, so we start by looking at that data, then move to the Solaris-specific data to gain a better insight into what is happening to a process.

The underlying data structures provided by the Solaris operating environment are described in full in the proc(4) manual page. The interface to /proc involves sending ioctl commands or opening special pseudo-files and reading them (a new feature of the Solaris 2.6 release). The data that ps uses is called PIOCPSINFO, and this is what ...