It would be interesting to read a little bit about the current implementations of the Attach API on the platforms that Sun ships Java6 on.
I realise that such information is subject-to-change, internal, unsupported, etc. But still a very interesting technical read (for some of us).
Perhaps an idea for a blog post?
The implementation is highly implementation specific due to security requirements. On Solaris it uses the doors IPC mechanism, on Linux is uses a Unix domain socket, and on Windows it runs a thread in the target VM. Some day, if there is time, it might be nice to write a technical article on this topic (although I suspect such details might not be too interesting for many java developers).
In that case I assume that the NT implementation uses the VirtualAllocEx() / CreateRemoteThread() functions?
I would then guess it was probably (of the three platforms) the most tricky to implement, compared to the Solaris/Linux approaches.
I guess you are right, a full article would only interest a minority, that's why I suggested a post on your blog.
There certainly is a minority (old system programmers) that simply cannot resist figuring out how some 'magic' is implemented under the hood.
