Solaris Application Programming, 1/e - Chapter 4 - Parent Directory

4.2 TOOLS THAT REPORT SYSTEM CONFIGURATION 53
It is also possible to bind a single process to a particular processor using the
pbind command, which takes the -b flag together with the pid and the processor
ID as inputs when binding a process to a processor, and the -u flag together with
the pid to unbind the process. Unlike processor sets that exclude other processes
from running on a given group of processors, processor binding ensures that a particular
process will run on a particular processor, but it does not ensure that other
processes will not also run there.
4.2.5 Reporting Instruction Sets Supported by Hardware (isalist)
isalist is a Solaris tool that outputs the instruction sets architectures (ISAs) the
processor supports. This can be useful for picking the appropriate compiler options
(this will be covered in Section 5.6.5 of Chapter 5). It is also useful in determining the
particular variant of CPU that the system contains. Example 4.6 shows output from
the isalist command on an UltraSPARC III-based system. It shows that there is a
SPARC processor in the system, and that this can handle SPARC V7, V8, and V9
binaries. The processor can also handle the VIS 2.0 instruction set extensions.
Example 4.6 Sample Output from the isalist Command
$ isalist
sparcv9+vis2 sparcv9+vis sparcv9 sparcv8plus+vis sparcv8plus sparcv8
sparcv8-fsmuld sparcv7 sparc
4.2.6 Reporting TLB Page Sizes Supported by Hardware
(pagesize)
In Section 1.9.2 of Chapter 1 we discussed the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB),
which the processor uses to map virtual memory addresses to physical memory
addesses. Different processors are able to support different page sizes. The advantage
of larger page sizes is that they let the TLB map more physical memory using
a fixed number of TLB entries. For example, a TLB with 64 entries can map
8KB*64=512KB when each entry is an 8KB page, but can map 4MB*64=256MB
when each entry holds a 4MB page. The number of different page sizes that can be
supported simultaneously is hardware-dependent. Even if the hardware supports
large page sizes, there is no guarantee that an application will recieve large pages
if it requests them. The number of available large pages depends on the amount of
memory in the system and the degree to which contiguous memory is available.
The pagesize command prints out the different TLB page sizes that the processor
can support. If no flags are specified, the utility will print the default page size. If
the flag -a is used, it will report all the available page sizes (see Example 4.7).