Developer Tools Enhancements

The following developer tools features and enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 5/09 release.

SunVTS 7.0 Patch Set 5

SunVTS^TM 7.0 Patch Set 5 has the following enhancements:

• Infrastructure enhancements:

  • Ability to specify device specific options in a test

  • Creation of generic or host-specific sessions for testing

  • Loop function on a particular test pass

  • Terminal user interface (UI) support for the creation or loading of generic and host-specific sessions

• CPU Diagnostics Enhancements:

  • System test, systest, performs processor-level isolation in the event of a failure

  • CPU test, cputest, is a multiprocess test. A single test binary can test all the CPUs in the system simultaneously.

• Memory Diagnostics Enhancements:

  • physmem-based ramtest has the option to read address length in Kbytes, Mbytes, and Gbytes

  • Improved l3 buffer test with added memory, march-test algorithms

• IO Diagnostics Enhancements:

  • New hlgraphicstest test is added for testing graphics cards

  • Users can specify back-to-back loopback option for the nxge interface in the network test

  • Cddvdtest is enhanced to support different drive speeds

  • Disktest is enhanced to support the following features:

    • Tuned to stress USB storage devices

    • Perform disk performance testing

    • Not perform write testing on the root disk

    • Test Solid State Devices (SSD) with test level, wear-leveling mechanism

    • Supports read-and-write buffer cache test

x86: CPU Performance Counter Updates for Intel Processors

Modern microprocessors contain hardware performance counters that enable the measurement of many different hardware events related to CPU behavior. Hardware events include instruction and data cache misses as well as various internal states of the processor. Data from the performance counters can be used to analyze and tune the behavior of software on a particular type of processor. The Solaris 10 5/09 OS provides access to CPU Performance Counters (cpc) through the libcpc(3LIB) interface and through the cputrack(1) and cpustat(1M) utilities.