What's New in System Troubleshooting?

This section describes new system troubleshooting features in the Solaris 8 release.

apptrace

A new application debugging tool, apptrace, enables application developers and system support personnel to debug application or system problems by providing call traces to Solaris shared libraries, which may show the series of events leading up to a point of failure.

The apptrace tool provides more reliable call-tracing than the previously available sotruss command. It also provides better display of function arguments, return values, and error cases for any Solaris library interface.

By default, apptrace traces calls directly from the executable object, specified on the command line, to every shared library the executable depends on.

See apptrace(1) for more information.

Improved Core File Management

The coreadm Command

This release introduces the coreadm command, which provides flexible core file naming conventions and better core file retention. For example, you can use the coreadm command to configure a system so that all process core files are placed in a single system directory. This means it is easier to track problems by examining the core files in a specific directory whenever a Solaris process or daemon terminates abnormally.

Two new configurable core file paths, per-process and global, can be enabled or disabled independently of each other. When a process terminates abnormally, it produces a core file in the current directory as in previous Solaris releases. But if a global core file path is enabled and set to /corefiles/core, for example, then each process that terminates abnormally would produce two core files: one in the current working directory and one in the /corefiles directory.

By default, the Solaris core paths and core file retention remain the same.

See "Managing Core Files (coreadm)" and coreadm(1M) for more information.

Examining Core Files With Proc Tools

Some of the proc tools have been enhanced to examine process core files as well as live processes. The proc tools are utilities that can manipulate features of the /proc file system.

The /usr/proc/bin/pstack, pmap, pldd, pflags, and pcred tools can now be applied to core files by specifying the name of the core file on the command line, similar to the way you specify a process ID to these commands. For example:

$ ./a.out
Segmentation Fault(coredump)
$ /usr/proc/bin/pstack ./core
core './core' of 19305: ./a.out
 000108c4 main     (1, ffbef5cc, ffbef5d4, 20800, 0, 0) + 1c
 00010880 _start   (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0) + b8

For more information on using proc tools to examine core files, see proc(1).

New Remote Console Messaging Features

New remote console features improve your ability to troubleshoot remote systems.

See "Enabling Remote Console Messaging" and consadm(1M) for more information.