Conversions

Solaris Resource Manager programs carry out conversions to and from the internal units used to store attribute values, so that the user is always presented with scaled units or raw units. This means that, with few exceptions, the user never need be concerned with the internal units used by Solaris Resource Manager.

The terms exa, peta, tera, giga, mega, and kilo are used within Solaris Resource Manager to represent powers of 2, not powers of 10. For example, a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, not 1,000,000 bytes. The powers of 2 for each term are 60 (exa), 50 (peta), 40 (tera), 30 (giga), 20 (mega), and 10 (kilo).

The programs that are the primary interface between users and the Solaris Resource Manager system are limadm, liminfo, and limreport. The conversions and scaling that they carry out are detailed in the following subsections.

The limadm Command

When changing attribute values, limadm allows numbers to be suffixed by scale characters: [EPTGMK][B][.][wdhms]. Uppercase and lowercase are interchangeable.

If the attribute has the dimension of storage (memory attributes) or of storage accrual, then a character from the first group (EPTGMK) is allowed. This multiplies by the number of bytes in 1 exabyte (E), petabyte (P), terabyte (T), gigabyte (G), megabyte (M), or kilobyte (K) as appropriate. The optional B character may be appended for user readability, but it has no effect.

If the attribute has the dimension of time (type date or time), or of storage accrual, then a character from the second group is allowed. This multiplies by the number of seconds in one week (w), day (d), hour (h), minute (m), or second (s) as appropriate.

An optional period may separate the storage and time units (for example. mh, M.h and MB.h all stand for 'megabyte hours').

Where ambiguity exists in the use of the M suffix, limadm attempts to derive its meaning from the context. If this is not possible, it is assumed to mean mega, not minutes.

When inputting large numbers, these conversion characters are useful to avoid errors in the order of magnitude of the entry, but the quantity is stored in internal units regardless of the method of entry.

A special scale character u can also be used, by itself, but only for memory attribute values. It indicates that the number is in machine-dependent (internal) units instead of bytes.

The liminfo Command

The liminfo(1SRM) command uses the same suffixes when reporting as limadm uses for input (see above). Normally, liminfo converts values into appropriate scaled formats to be printed, but the -r option can be used to cause liminfo to print values in their raw (unscaled) form. For example, memory is normally scaled to a suitable unit, such as megabytes (for example, '102 MB'), but specifying the -r option causes it to be printed in bytes (for example, 106954752 bytes).

The limreport Command

The limreport(1SRM) command always reports values in their raw (unscaled) form. If scaled values are required, the conversion must be stated explicitly in the expression used to display the value. For example, to display total virtual memory usage for all users in kilobytes, rounded up to the nearest kilobyte:

# limreport 'flag.real' '%-8.8s %d KB\n' lname '(memory.usage+1k-1)/1k' 

As this example demonstrates, you can use the scaling suffixes on numbers in expressions, which simplifies the conversion of raw units to scaled values.

Note that the internal units for some attributes are not the same as their 'raw' form. Normally, this does not concern the user because all the Solaris Resource Manager programs carry out conversion to scaled units or raw units. However, it does mean that, for example, select-expressions in limreport that specify an exact match on a number of bytes will always fail to match if a number is specified that is not an integral multiple of the relevant internal unit.