RFR (L): Adding core file parsing on Mac OS X to SA

[Kevin Walls]

Hi -

Just a note that I'd like to contribute a cleaner way for the Debugger 
and Process classes here to load a core file, which I hadn't yet handed 
over.  I'll have that ready shortly...

Thanks
Kevin

On 08/05/12 12:11, Staffan Larsen wrote:
> The Serviceability Agent currently has an outage on Mac OS X compared 
> to other platforms in that we cannot read core files. We plan to 
> address this for 7u6 by incorporating code from a separate tool called 
> "kjdb" developed at Oracle. Kjdb is a cross-platform core-file 
> debugger written completely in Java that currently works on ELF 
> (solaris, linux) and Mach-O (mac) core files. Since it is written in 
> Java it can read core files from a different system than the system 
> you are running kjdb on, which is very useful.
>
> The alternative to incorporating the kjdb technology would have been 
> to implement this in C as is done for the other platforms, but reusing 
> existing code saves us some trouble. The kjdb debugger backend will 
> automatically be enabled when you are opening a Mach-O core file (or 
> if you explicitly set the -Duse.kjdb property when starting SA).
>
> The risks with this is that this is a large addition of relatively new 
> code to SA (around 100 files). It also means that debugging a live 
> process or a core file on OS X will use different debugger backends 
> which may have different behavior and bugs.
>
> This change also adds a basic test that creates a core file and uses 
> SA to print the thread dumps in the core. This test runs on all 
> platforms, not just Mac OS X. Other than that test, some level of 
> manual testing has been done with various core files.
>
> Please see the webrev at: 
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~sla/kjdb/webrev.01/ 
> <http://cr.openjdk.java.net/%7Esla/kjdb/webrev.01/>
>
> There are quite a number of added files in this webrev, so it's 
> probably best to concentrate on the changes in the existing files.
>
> Thanks,
> /Staffan