Matthew Simmons wrote: > On 5/28/06, *John Levon* <john.levon at sun.com > <mailto:john.levon at sun.com>> wrote: >> I believe the original reason that MDB didn't exist, which is a >> pretty good one. > That's true. MDB has been out now for what, three releases? At what > point does this justification lose its weight?
At the EOSL of a release, and not before. >> - sustaining need to look at pre-mdb crash dumps > What does that mean at this point -- 2.6? I was under the impression > that S7 support was not long for this world, to say nothing of 2.6. At > some point surely you can just say that you're not doing further > development of Solaris CAT for a given release. Given its age, surely > 2.6 is one of those releases for which up-to-the-second debugging > support isn't critical. Sure, but we have a different method of providing support for a Solaris release compared to the way adb and mdb provide that support. We also have a different model of operation. >> - they also need a convenient way to automatically adapt to the >> kernel version being investigated. The kernel bits of MDB aren't >> really able to do that (yet) >> - interaction with MDB isn't really there, as you mention >> - there's no resources to do it > Are there resources for adding new features to Solaris CAT? If there > are, then clearly the issue isn't one of resources per se, but rather of > desire or will. Solaris CAT is developed by a team which volunteers their time, energy and expertise. There is no funding provided to do development of it. >> Considering all that, the sensible approach seems to be to start off >> by adding a simple backend to scat's ksh core which can interact with >> [the correct version of] mdb's command line. Then, each module of >> scat can be replaced, as time allows, with an mdb module or dcmd in >> a piecemeal fashion. This isn't at all hard to do. The old scat source >> for that module would linger on for older kernels. But eventually, >> essentially all the duplicate code in scat could be replaced with >> MDB-based code. > Exactly. We (the Solaris CAT development team) do have plans on the front, but since we are a volunteer group with no funding this will take time. > And while we're on the subject, can we *please* get Solaris CAT > renamed? The current acronym is an embarrassment. What would you rename it to? Why do cats embarrass you? James C. McPherson -- Solaris Datapath Engineering Data Management Group Sun Microsystems
