レナート   Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz   ﻟﻴﻨﺎﺭﺕ

Stefan Kost recently pointed me to the fact that the Linux system call prctl(PR_SET_NAME) does not in fact change the process name, but the task name (comm field) -- in contrast to what the man page suggests.

That makes it very useful for naming threads, since you can read back the name you set with PR_SET_NAME earlier from the /proc file system (/proc/$PID/task/$TID/comm on newer kernels, /proc/$PID/task/$TID/stat's second field on older kernels), and hence distuingish which thread might be responsible for the high CPU load or similar problems.

So, now go, if you have a project which involves a lot of threads, name them all individually, and make it easier to debug them. What's missing now, of course, is that gdb learns this and shows the comm name when doing info threads.

I have changed PulseAudio now to name all threads it creates.

Of course, what would be even better than this is full file system extended attribute support in procfs, so that we could attach arbitrary information to processes and threads, including references to .desktop files and such.

posted at: 01:22 | path: /projects | permanent link to this entry | 5 comments