Permanent memory’s riddle

Several days ago I noticed that something wrong was happening with the way cfgadm reported the size of the permanent memory. On a partitioned SunFire 6900 iron with two SBs (SB0 and SB2) in a domain the output looks the following:

cfgadm -alv | grep perm
N0.SB0::memory connected configured ok base address 0x0, 33554432 KBytes total, 33403472 KBytes permanent

I don’t believe in coincidences and the fact that permanent memory was equal to the size of one SB’s memory had raised an eyebrow.

# prtconf | grep Mem
Memory size: 65536 Megabytes

We all know that a permanent memory is Kernel plus OpenBoot and if cfgadm was correct then it’s an easy deal to check that with mdb but…

# echo "::memstat" | mdb -k
Page Summary                Pages                MB  %Tot
------------     ----------------  ----------------  ----
Kernel                     129720              1013    2%
Anon                      1357367             10604   16%
Exec and libs               30298               236    0%
Page cache                 278509              2175    3%
Free (cachelist)          1858089             14516   23%
Free (freelist)           4581704             35794   56%

Total                     8235687             64341
Physical                  8226460             64269

There is an Oracle Standby running inside this domain and the output of “ipcs -ma”, as expected, almost exactly matches with ‘Anon’ section from the aforementioned mdb’s output and when the standby is stopped anonymous memory reduces proportionally. But why on the earth cfgadm produces such an outrageous report?! Reboot doesn’t help and the system is fully patched using, yes a bit outdated, EIS DVD from the 30th of March 2010.

# uname -a
SunOS sf6900-2-da 5.10 Generic_142900-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire

So far, the answer to this puzzle is yet to be found but if you have a solution on your hands than please give me a hint. ;-)

P.S. This system doesn’t have a support contract so opening a ticket on the sunsolve is not an option.

Posted on September 20, 2010 at 10:11 am by sergeyt · Permalink
In: Solaris

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