The HotSpot Serviceability Agent (SA) is a debugger for hotspot core dumps and hung processes. There is a read-only JDI (Java Debugger Interface) implementation on top of SA. This is part of JDK product and the classes are in $JDK/tools/sa-jdi.jar. In addition, there are few serviceability tools in $JDK/bin, namely, jstack (java stack trace tool), jmap (heap tool), jinfo (Java config tool) and jsadebugd. The classes for these are also in sa-jdi.jar file. sa-jdi.jar file is built along with hotspot (libjvm.so) on Solaris and Linux platforms. On Windows platform, SA-JDI is not included and serviceability tools do not use SA. Apart from these, HotSpot SA consists of a number of tools that are *not* included in JDK product bits. The sources and makefile for all-of-SA (including non-productized stuff) are under $HOTSPOT_WS/agent directory. The makefile $HOTSPOT/agent/make directory and shell scripts (and batch files) are used to build and run SA non-product tools. There is also documentation of SA under $HOTSPOT/agent/doc directory. To build complete SA, you need to have Rhino Mozilla jar (js.jar) version 1.5R5 under $HOTSPOT/agent/src/share/lib directory. Rhino is JavaScript interpreter written in Java. Rhino is used to implement SA features such as * SA command line debugger's JavaScript interface - refer to $HOTSPOT/agent/doc/clhsdb.html - refer to $HOTSPOT/agent/doc/jsdb.html * SA simple object query language (SOQL) - language to query Java heap. Rhino's "js.jar" is not included in hotspot source bundles. You need to download it from http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/download.html. Without js.jar, $HOTSPOT/agent/make/Makefile will fail to build. But, note that sa-jdi.jar containing the productized portions of SA will still be built when you build hotspot JVM.