Chapter 11. Kernel Statistics

With contributions from Peter Boothby

The Solaris kernel provides a set of functions and data structures for device drivers and other kernel modules to export module-specific statistics to the outside world. This infrastructure, referred to as kstat, provides the following to the Solaris software developer:

  • C-language functions for device drivers and other kernel modules to present statistics

  • C-language functions for applications to retrieve statistics data from Solaris without needing to directly read kernel memory

  • Perl-based command-line program /usr/bin/kstat to access statistics data interactively or in shell scripts (introduced in Solaris 8)

  • Perl library interface for constructing custom performance-monitoring utilities ...

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