Sunday, September 14, 2008

Refactoring solview and jkstat

Originally, JKstat and SolView were completely separate.

The latest released version of SolView comes with JKstat, so you can launch some of the JKstat demos.

I'm looking at much closer ties between the two. I've had a much more in-depth use for JKstat in mind all along, and the way I'm doing it is by adding what I'm calling a "System Explorer" to SolView.

So SolView will have a view of all the interesting components of a system: processors (chips, cores, and threads), memory, disks, filesystems, networks. Anything else if I can think of how to do it. And then will display pretty much everything you can about the selected object. A lot of that information is gleaned from kstats using JKstat.

From that point of view, something like the ZFS ARC demo makes more sense as a sophisticated component inside SolView rather than a standalone JKstat demo application.

So what I'm planning on doing (and this may take a while) is to have a spring clean of the demos in JKstat, removing the bad ones entirely and moving the more complex and involved ones to SolView. And then splitting JKstat into two logically separate parts: the core API (which has no graphical components), and the graphical browser with some basic demos. The two parts of JKstat will still be developed together, although I wouldn't expect that much development once the process is complete, as JKstat will be stable and the higher-level fancy tools will be developed independently under the SolView banner.

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