Number 18 of 20: pmap(1) improvements
go to the Solaris 10 top 11-20 list for more
pmap(1)
For the uninitiated, pmap(1) is a tool that lets you observe the mappings in a process. Here's some typical output:
311981: /usr/bin/sh
08046000 8K rw--- [ stack ]
08050000 80K r-x-- /sbin/sh
08074000 4K rwx-- /sbin/sh
08075000 16K rwx-- [ heap ]
C2AB0000 64K rwx-- [ anon ]
C2AD0000 752K r-x-- /lib/libc.so.1
C2B9C000 28K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
C2BA3000 16K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
C2BB1000 4K rwxs- [ anon ]
C2BC0000 132K r-x-- /lib/ld.so.1
C2BF1000 4K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
C2BF2000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
total 1116K
You can use this to understand various adresses you might see from a debugger, or you can use other modes of pmap(1) to see the page sizes being used for various mappings, how much of the mappings have actually been faulted in, the attached ISM, DISM or System V shared memory segments, etc. In Solaris 10, pmap(1) has some cool new features -- after a little more thought, I'm not sure that this really belongs on the top 11-20 list, but this is a very cool tool and gets some pretty slick new features; anyways the web affords me the chance for some revisionist history if I feel like updating the list...
thread and signal stacks
When a process creates a new thread, that thread needs a stack. By default, that stack comes from an anonymous mapping. Before Solaris 10, those mappings just appeared as \[ anon \] -- undifferentiated from other anonymous mappings; now we label them as thread stacks:
311992: ./mtpause.x86 2
08046000 8K rwx-- [ stack ]
08050000 4K r-x-- /home/ahl/src/tests/mtpause/mtpause.x86
08060000 4K rwx-- /home/ahl/src/tests/mtpause/mtpause.x86
C294D000 4K rwx-R [ stack tid=3 ]
C2951000 4K rwxs- [ anon ]
C2A5D000 4K rwx-R [ stack tid=2 ]
...
That can be pretty useful if you're trying to figure out what some address means in a debugger; before you could tell that it was from some anonymous mapping, but what the heck was that mapping all about? Now you can tell at a glance that its the stack for a particular thread.
Another kind of stack is the alternate signal stack. Alternate signal stacks let threads handle signals like SIGSEGV which might arise due to a stack overflow of the main stack (leaving no room on that stack for the signal handler). You can establish an alternate signal stack using the sigaltstack(2) interface. If you allocate the stack by creating an anonymous mapping using mmap(2) pmap(1) can now identify the per-thread alternate signal stacks:
...
FEBFA000 8K rwx-R [ stack tid=8 ]
FEFFA000 8K rwx-R [ stack tid=4 ]
FF200000 64K rw--- [ altstack tid=8 ]
FF220000 64K rw--- [ altstack tid=4 ]
...
core file content
Core files have always contained a partial snapshot of a process's memory mappings. Now that you can you manually adjust the content of a core file (see my previous entry) some ptools will give you warnings like this:
pargs: core 'core' has insufficient content
So what's in that core file? pmap(1) now let's you see that easily; mappings whose data is missing from the core file are marked with a \*:
$ coreadm -P heap+stack+data+anon
$ cat
^\Quit - core dumped
$ pmap core
core 'core' of 312077: cat
08046000 8K rw--- [ stack ]
08050000 8K r-x--* /usr/bin/cat
08062000 4K rwx-- /usr/bin/cat
08063000 40K rwx-- [ heap ]
C2AB0000 64K rwx--
C2AD0000 752K r-x--* /lib/libc.so.1
C2B9C000 28K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
C2BA3000 16K rwx-- /lib/libc.so.1
C2BC0000 132K r-x--* /lib/ld.so.1
C2BF1000 4K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
C2BF2000 8K rwx-- /lib/ld.so.1
total 1064K
If you're looking at a core file from an earlier release or from a customer in the field, you can quickly tell if you're going to be able to get the data you need out of the core file or if the core file can only be interpreted on the original machine or whatever.