System Process Management Changes

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The following features are new or changed in this release.

Named Thread Support

This Oracle Solaris 11 release includes thread naming capabilities that enable the naming of user processes and kernel threads. You can display thread names by using the ps, prstat, and pstack commands. In addition, new built-in variables, uthreadname and kthreadname, have been added to DTrace to enable you to access the names of user and kernel threads.

You can set and read process thread names by using the pthread_setname_np (3C) / pthread_attr_setname_np (3C) and pthread_getname_np (3C) / pthread_attr_getname_np (3C) functions. See the appropriate man pages for more information.

The following example shows how to display thread names by using the ps command with the –L option:

$ ps -L
PID   LWP   LNAME       TTY         LTIME  CMD
2644    1               pts/32      0:00   bash
14320   1   foomoe      pts/32      0:00   a.out
14320   2   foocurly    pts/32      0:00   a.out
14320   3   foolarry    pts/32      0:00   a.out
14320   4   fooshemp    pts/32      0:00   a.out
14321   1               pts/32      0:00   ps

System Process Summary Information

Both Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Solaris 11 include some system processes that perform a specific task, but typically do not require any administration, such as those that are listed in the following table.

Table 13 System Processes That Require No Administration

System Process	Description
`fsflush`	System daemon that flushes pages to disk
`init`	Initial system process that starts and restarts other processes and SMF components
`intrd`	System process that monitors and balances system load due to interrupts
`kmem_task`	System process that monitors memory cache sizes
`pageout`	System process that controls memory paging to disk
`sched`	System process that is responsible for OS scheduling and process swapping
`vm_tasks`	System process with one thread per processor that balances and distributes virtual memory related workloads across CPUs for better performance.
`zpool-pool-name`	System process for each ZFS storage pool containing the I/O `taskq` threads for the associated pool