> On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 06:10:20PM +0000, Jonathan Haslam wrote: > > I think it would be good to mention in the revised pmap man page > > that it is bad to cross the streams in such a way. People get > > used to forcing procbin tools and having a target of pmap > > dump out unexpectedly could be shocking to say the least. > > Forcing the proc tools is a bad habit to have. If there weren't any > side effects, we wouldn't have made it a separate option. Note that > the proc(1) man page does state that: > > Caution should be exercised when using the -F flag. Imposing > two controlling processes on one victim process can lead to > chaos. Safety is assured only if the primary controlling > process, typically a debugger, has stopped the victim pro- > cess and the primary controlling process is doing nothing at > the moment of application of the proc tool in question. > > This text obviously should have been copied to the new man page when > we pulled pmap out of proc(1). (Filed bug 6353091)
Note that standard Solaris pmap ignores -F option. The -F option puts it back to work since it uses agent LWP to issue meminfo(2) calls on behalf of the target process. A typical use was, indeed, stopping the process with either MDB or dtrace stop() action and examining the process. - Sasha
