Monday, March 11, 2019

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



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