DTrace stop() action

The stop() action in DTrace stops an entire process... well, actually it doesn't. It stops a single thread in a multi-threaded process, which got me surprised as I always thought it did stop an entire process. Now, this is actually very useful, though a stopall() action which would stop all threads could now be useful as well :)

Update: this is getting more complicated now, the way stop() action behaves depends on probe type it is called from. For example, if called from a probe from syscall provider it will just stop a thread which called the syscall, but if called from a probe from PID provider it will stop entire process with all its threads. This is getting confusing...

btw: pstop PID stops entire process while pstop PID/LWPID stops a single thread

DTrace %Y print format with nanoseconds

Small but useful extension to DTrace is now available in Solaris 11.4.SRU6. It allows to easily print current date with an optional nanosecond resolution. It is disabled by default for backward compatibility.

To enable it you need to add timedecimals option to dtrace:


# dtrace -q -x timedecimals -n syscall::open*:entry \
    '{printf("%Y %s called %s()\n", walltimestamp, execname, probefunc);}'
2019 Mar  1 11:50:48.774114445 firefox called openat64()
2019 Mar  1 11:50:49.149290513 dtrace called openat()
2019 Mar  1 11:50:49.149283375 dtrace called openat()
2019 Mar  1 11:50:50.030217373 firefox called openat64()
2019 Mar  1 11:50:49.974253263 firefox called openat64()
2019 Mar  1 11:50:50.114684381 VBoxService called openat()
^C

You can also specify number of decimal places to be printed, fox example:

# dtrace -q -x timedecimals=2 -n syscall::open*:entry \
    '{printf("%Y %s called %s()\n", walltimestamp, execname, probefunc);}'
2019 Mar  1 11:56:51.09 VBoxService called openat()
2019 Mar  1 11:56:51.09 VBoxService called openat()
2019 Mar  1 11:56:51.45 dtrace called openat()
^C