Resources

Reading on Solaris' libumem

The Basics:

• De facto libumen how-to
• The source code on OpenSolaris website

General Articles:

• Number 11 of 20: libumem - Adam Leventhal’s Weblog - Talks about the general benefits of libumem, and gives a simple example of its usage. There is also an interesting set of comments on libumem vs. Purify.
• Debugging with libumem and MDB - Jonathan Adams’s Weblog - MDB and libumem debugging options.
• The implementation of ::findleaks - Jonathan Adams’s Weblog - Shows how ::findleaks is implemented for libumem.
• How to use libumem to find a bad free call - Chris Quenelle’s Weblog - Example of libumem finding a bad free().
• Hidden features of libumem - firewalls and protecting overflows - Peter Harvey’s blog - Use libumem’s firewall feature to immediately trap “accesses outside of the allocated memory”.
• Playing with Solaris memory debuggers - Will Fiveash’s Solaris Stuff Weblog - Gives a basic overview of the commands that can be used with libumen, and also compares watchmalloc with libumem. I found this statement interesting: “Nico Williams suggests that LD_PRELOAD could be used with a special lib that interposes the normal exit() with a exit() that calls abort() to create a core dump which in conjunction with libumem could be scanned for leaks.”
• Speeding up your small crypto operations - Tony’s Blog - Give some processes a performance boost using libumem.
• gssd misbehaving badly - semery’s blog - Shows debugging gssd with libumem.
• libuutil and designing for debuggability - Predictable: Stephen Hahn’s blog at Sun Microsystems - Using libumem in the design of debuggable programs.
• Finding memory leaks - Kool Aid Served Daily - Another example of using libumen to find leaks.
• Little-known performance enhancements #2: Solaris tuning - cn=Directory Manager - Performance tuning with libumem.

Slab Allocator Articles:

• Slab Allocator - Jeff Bonwick’s Weblog - How the slab allocator came into being.
• Some block comments about libumem - Jonathan Adams’s Weblog - Describes the layout of the umem buffer and slab with some ASCI art.
• Tails from a core file - Brendan Greg describes how diagnosing a customer's problem with dtrace led to the idea of per-thread caches in libumem.
• Adding Per-Thread Caching to libumem - Robert Mustacchi speaking at the BayLISA meetup at Joyent, August 16, 2012
• How Memory Allocation Affects Performance in Multithreaded Programs

DBX Articles:

• More about libumem - Will Fiveash’s Solaris Stuff Weblog - Points to some resources for using libumem with DBX.
• simple umem integration with dbx - Chris Quenelle’s Weblog - Simple integration of libumem with DBX.