Goodbye to a problem indicator

We have a new Sun T5220 with the new Niagara-II chip in it. I don't know if it's 8-core/8-thread or 4-core/16-thread but it shows up in Solaris as 16 CPUs.

I'm running a cpu-intensive process (bzip) and prstat is only showing it as using 1.2% of the CPU. On another older system, the same bzip takes up 25% of the 4-proc box.

On the old system, it's clear that bzip is a single-CPU bottleneck (because it's single-threaded). On the new one, well running full-out but only taking 1% doesn't look like much.

--Joe

Forcing kernel dump on Opensolaris x86

Just in case you were caught off guard by the documentation that points to using "rip::c" in mdb, that apparently doesn't work on Opensolaris, at least on build 70 that we have installed on our x4500s.

But on the bright side, I found a mention at wikia (http://opensolaris.wikia.com/wiki/Miscellaneous_FAQ) that says I should use $<systemdump. And that works.