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From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
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Subject: Re: libkvm: consumers of kvm_getprocs for non-live kernels?
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On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Ulrich Spörlein wrote:

> I have this cleanup of libkvm sitting in my tree and it needs a little bit 
> of testing, especially the function kvm_proclist, which is only called from 
> kvm_deadprocs which is only called from kvm_getprocs when kd is not ALIVE.
>
> The only consumer in our tree that I can make out is *probably* kgdb, as 
> ps(1), top(1), w(1), pkill(1), fstat(1), systat(1), pmcstat(8) and bsnmpd 
> don't really work on coredumps
>
> But, the kgdb file gnu/usr.bin/binutils/gdb/kvm-fbsd.c, where kvm_getprocs 
> is probably called on a dead kernel is not even used during build!
>
> So I guess I'm staring at dead code here, any kvm people around that can 
> clue me in?

Even if those tools aren't using kvm properly, they should be.  ps(1) at least 
used to work quite well on coredumps, and perhaps still does?

Stas has ongoing work on a libprocstat, you might want to give him a ping. 
I'm not sure if he plans to refactor some of those existing tools to use that 
library or not, but crashdump support is a key goal of it.

Robert
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