Introduction to Crash Dump Analysis and the SunOS Kernel (ST-375)
The Introduction to Crash Dump Analysis and the SunOS Kernel course provides students with essential skills to diagnose and resolve system problems, beginning with whether a system problem is due to hardware or software. If it's hardware, which piece of hardware is causing the problem? If it's software, is there a patch that fixes this problem? What tools can be used to help identify the causes of system problems? Where can they be obtained, and how are they used? This course helps learners to answer these questions and to identify and resolve basic Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) problems successfully.
This course replaces:
- ST-370: Core Dump Analysis
This course repackages:
- ISA-160: Introduction to Solaris Crash Analysis
- ISA-165: Kernel Overview
- ISA-170: Introduction to fm
- ISA-175: Introduction to adb, mdb, and crash
| » | Details below |
Who Can Benefit
Students who can benefit from this course are experienced system administrators and support personnel at self-supporting Sun installations, as well as third-party driver developers.Prerequisites
To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to:- Administer the Solaris OS on a Sun server
- Understand basic operating system concepts
- Use a World Wide Web (WWW) browser, such as the Netscape browser
- Manipulate files and directories on a UNIX file system
- Be familiar with fault analysis and problem-solving techniques
- Access the messages file
- Boot a Solaris OE machine
- Modify OpenBoot PROM (OBP) variables
- Use the SunSolve(SM) program effectively
- Have a SunSolve account to access other than the free collections
- Modify swap partition sizes
- Have some familiarity with C programming concepts and syntax
Courses and reading to help students obtain these prerequisites include:
- SA-239: Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System
- SA-299: Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System
- The book Panic! by Chris Drake and Kimberly Brown
Skills Gained
Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:- Distinguish software-caused system crashes from hardware-caused system crashes
- Retrieve initial analysis information from a crash dump using Solaris CAT, ACT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger
- Distinguish among unique panic string, bad trap, and hang crash dumps
- Identify appropriate SunSolve search strings for unique panic string and bad trap crash dumps
- Use the SunSolve program to find bugs and cases related to the crash dumps or error messages
- Given a C structure declaration, describe how the data structure is stored in memory and how it looks when displayed by Solaris CAT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger
- Describe the major kernel subsystems and use Solaris CAT, the adb debugger, and the mdb debugger to display the subsystems' related data structures
Related Courses
Before:
- Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-239)
- Advanced System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-299)
After:
- Solaris 9 Operating System Internals (SP-365)
- Advanced Crash Dump Analysis and SPARC Architecture (ST-475)
Course Content
Module 1 - Gathering Information
- Obtain system environment information
- Collect system crash data
- Determine if a system is hung
- Obtain a crash dump from a hung system
- Force crash dumps for hard hangs
- Describe the mechanism and system resources necessary to create crash dumps
- Describe how to configure a system to save crash dumps
- Troubleshoot crash dump failures
- Describe and run SunExplorer software
- Describe system information used to analyze a system crash
Module 2 - Analyzing Information
- Differentiate between software and hardware problems
- Interpret the output from the prtdiag utility
- Interpret the output from the Sun Explorer software
- Analyze patch information
- Describe the types of device names and their components
- Display the device tree
- Interpret information in the messages file
- Interpret memory error messages
Module 3 - Understanding Data Structures
- Describe how a C language structure looks in memory
- Describe how a pointer is used in the C language
- Describe linked lists
- Describe stacks
- Describe hashing
Module 4 - Analyzing System Crash Dumps
- Define common terms used in describing information in crash dumps
- Describe the information used for initial crash dump analysis
- Describe information sources within the SunSolve program that are useful for resolving system crashes
- Describe the type of information available in bug reports
- Use the SunSolve program to locate technical information, bugs, and patches related to system crashes
- Appropriately use the kenv tool
- Use Automated Crash Tool (ACT) to obtain initial crash dump information
- Use the adb debugger to obtain initial crash dump information
- Use the Modular Debugger (MDB) to obtain initial crash dump information
- Use Solaris Crash Analysis Tool (CAT) to obtain initial crash dump information
Module 5 - Introducing Kernel Features and Organization
- Describe the advantages of a modular kernel
- Define the difference between the SunOS software package and the Solaris OS package
- Describe the location of kernel modules on disk
- Describe the components of the SunOS software
- Describe user processes
- Describe interrupts
- Describe multithreading
- Describe the location of structure definitions
Module 6 - Exploring Kernel Services
- Describe the major kernel services
- Describe what traps are and how they are processed
- Describe how system calls are processed
- Describe what synchronization and protection are and why they are needed
- Describe the Solaris OS locking mechanisms
- Describe signals and how they are processed
- Describe how interrupts of various levels are processed
- Describe kernel clock handling
- Describe what callouts are and how they are stored and processed
- Describe what cyclics are and what parts of the kernel are clients of this service
Module 7 - Examining the Process Subsystem
- Draw an image of a running multithreaded process
- Describe multithreading in the kernel and processes
- Identify the structures used by the kernel to support a process
- Describe the process life cycle, including thread creation
- Describe how threads are scheduled
- Describe priority inversion and how the kernel resolves the problem
- Describe how time stamps are used in the kernel
- Describe how the kernel controls processors
Module 8 - Examining the Memory Subsystem
- Describe memory management issues from the kernel perspective
- Describe paged memory
- Identify the process structures used in address translation
- Describe anonymous memory
- Describe kernel page structures and their use
- Describe the MMU and the HAT layer
- Describe the kernel address space
- Describe kernel memory allocation
- Describe paging and swapping
Module 9 - Examining the File and I/O Subsystem
- Describe the user's view of the UNIX file system
- Describe the basic file system structure
- Describe the virtual file system framework
- Describe how file system mounting and path name resolution are accomplished
- Describe the use of the Directory Name Lookup Cache (DNLC)
- Describe the UFS file system specific data structures
- Describe process file management
- Describe the use of the specfs file system
- Describe the kernel device tree
- Draw a simple stream and explain its elements
Copyright 2004-2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.