You can record kernel profiles by using Performance Analyzer or using the er_kernel utility. When you profile the kernel in Performance Analyzer, you are also running the er_kernel utility in the background.
The er_kernel utility uses DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into the Oracle Solaris operating system.
The er_kernel utility captures kernel profile data and records the data as a Performance Analyzer experiment in a format similar to a user experiment recorded with collect. The experiment can be processed by the er_print utility or Performance Analyzer. A kernel experiment can show function data, caller-callee data, instruction-level data, and a timeline, but not source-line data because most Oracle Solaris modules do not contain line-number tables.