site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On Feb 1, 2006, at 7:46 PM, Sam Vaughan wrote: On 02/02/2006, at 1:30 AM, Derek Kumar <drk@apple.com> wrote: Something else that I wanted to note was that a feature that was asked for last WWDC, the ability to examine the live, running kernel on the same machine, has been in use internally for quite some time, and should be made available externally in a forthcoming tools release. Tremendous news, Derek! I remember asking for KPI support for walking kernel threads live at WWDC '04. I'd love to see an Apple- supported tool made available to do it. I haven't had the time to port my own 10.3 implementation to 10.4 and I really miss it when I need to look for deadlocks or stuck threads, especially on remote test machines in far off lands. Remote debugging isn't always feasible and I've never found Shark quite up to the task. We've also added a "stack snapshot" facility, implemented as a system call, which will gather a coherent stack trace for every thread in the system (user and kernel stacks). Internally, this is being used to sample the state of the system when the spinny cursor appears for too long, and collate that data in an automated fashion for later analysis. This is actually present (sans any documentation whatsoever) in the current x86 kernel, but a more general release and documented interface probably won't be available until Leopard. I don't know if it will be very useful to external developers, but I can see it being used to track down inexplicable latencies and so on when performance tuning. Derek _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com