System Resources Enhancements

The Solaris 9 release includes the following system resources enhancements.

Solaris 9 Resource Manager

Solaris 9 Resource Manager provides improvements to the management of system resources. The resource manager features enable system administrators to do the following:

• Allocate computing resources on a system.

• Monitor how these resources are being used so that allocations can be adjusted if necessary.

• Generate extended accounting information on resource usage. This information can be used for capacity planning and billing.

The resource controls framework allows you to set constraints on the system resources that are consumed by processes and tasks. Tasks are collections of processes that are related to a single activity.

Resource pools provide a way to partition system resources, such as processors, and maintain those partitions across reboots. A new fair share scheduler (FSS) has been added that allows the fine-grained sharing of CPU resources on a system.

These features enhance your ability to manage how resources are allocated to applications in a server consolidation environment.

In the Solaris 9 release, the full functionality is administered through a command-line interface. Performance monitoring and the setting of resource controls can also be done through the Solaris Management Console.

For more information on resource management, see the System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services and the following man pages:

• prctl(1)

• pooladm(1M)

• poolcfg(1M)

• rctladm(1M)

• project(4)

• FSS(7)

New Fixed-Priority (FX) Scheduling Class

The FX scheduler provides a scheduling policy for processes that require user or application control of scheduling priorities. The priorities of processes that run under FX are fixed. These priorities are not dynamically adjusted by the system. The FX class has the same priority range as the TS, IA, and FSS classes.

For more information on the FX scheduler, see the Programming Interfaces Guide and the Multithreaded Programming Guide. Also see the priocntl(1) and dispadmin(1M) man pages.

For restrictions on using the FX and FSS schedulers on the same system, see Chapter 9, Fair Share Scheduler, in System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services.

New Display Options for the df, du, and ls Commands

The df, du, and ls -l commands have a new -h option. This option displays disk usage and file or file system sizes in powers of 1024. This display simplifies interpretation of the output of the df, du, and ls -l commands. The -h option provides disk space in Kbytes, Mbytes, Gbytes, or Tbytes if the file or directory size is larger than 1024 bytes.

See the df(1M), du(1), and ls(1) man pages for further information.

Improved Process Debugging With the pargs and preap Commands

Two new commands, pargs and preap, improve process debugging. Use the pargs command to print the arguments and environment variables that are associated with a live process or a core file. Use the preap command to remove zombie processes.

See the preap(1) man page and the proc(1) man page for information on using these commands.