SA.NEXT - SA feedback needed

[Christian Thalinger]

On Feb 7, 2014, at 2:53 PM, Coleen Phillimore <coleen.phillimore at oracle.com> wrote:

> 
> On 1/31/14 9:19 AM, Dmitry Samersoff wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>> 
>> I would like to start a discussion about future of hotspot debugger,
>> known as serviceability agent or SA.
>> 
>> How you typically use it? What do you expect from it?  What is missed?
>> 
>> Please, share your stories and wishes.
>> 
>> And please, fill the small quiz:
>> 
>> 1. How often do you use SA?
> 
> I tried once, but I think it was broken.
>> 
>> 2. On what platform do you use SA?
>> 
>> 3. Do you use it to analyze life processes or coredumps?
> 
> I would use it to analyze core files, not live processes.   I would only use the command line version not the web interface.
>> 
>> 5. What other debuggers do you use to debug hotspot issues
> 
> With permgen removal, native debuggers like gdb and dbx are very effective for looking at hotspot code, since Metadata are represented as C++ objects.  Getting the name of methods and classes is still a bit tricky in a core file because there are a few levels of indirection.   Also with FDS we can have native debug information from product builds which will help greatly for customer issues.
> 
> I've said before that I believe the SA should be discontinued unless the problem of duplicated hotspot code in it can be resolved.   We are in the process of changing many things in the code and the tax of a duplicate implementation in Java is too high.  Find a way to use the libjvm.so or a libjvm_sa.so to retrieve hotspot internals.

The main problem, as I see it, is the lack of testing and self-verification.  If the SA would do that as part of compilation we wouldn’t have a broken SA every other build.

> 
> Coleen
>> 
>> -Dmitry
>> 
>