Solaris Process data from Java

I've got a java interface, called jproc to process data in Solaris, using the procfs filesystem.

In the latest version, apart from starting on a tree-view (currently known to be buggy and woefully incomplete), there are a couple of little technical tricks I had to learn.

The first is that accessing the process data, particularly sizes, of a 64-bit application, requires a 64-bit application. That's why tools such as top, ps, and prstat are 64-bit (via isaexec). Now, there's a 64-bit java for Solaris, so I needed to compile my JNI library in 64-bit mode too. Normally you just call

cc -G

but for 64-bit mode it's a little more complicated than that. In particular, just adding -m64 the way you would expect doesn't work. And it's different on x86 and sparc. So what I've found works, is:

amd64:
  cc -Kpic -shared -m64 

sparc:
  cc -xcode=pic13 -shared -m64

The other thing I wanted to do was to make the display of items in tables a little more readable. JTable just picks up the type of data and defaults to a fairly basic display. My first attempt was to convert my data to pretty strings, and display those, but that had a couple of snags: by default strings get left-justified, which wasn't what I wanted, and sorting broke because it sorted the strings rather than the underlying numerical data.

The answer, of course, is to use a custom TableCellRenderer. This only affects the presentation, so that sorting works correctly against the underlying data. So far all I've done is simply humanize some of the values, but so much more is possible.