Examining the process table

The proc command of crash displays information held in the kernel's process table. It shows process information similar to that displayed by the -elf options of the ps(C) command. The following example shows proc being used to display the first eight slots of the process table:

> proc 0..7
PROC TABLE SIZE = 47
SLOT ST PID PPID PGRP UID PRI CPU EVENT            NAME         FLAGS
   0 s    0    0    0   0  95   0 runout           sched        load sys lock nwak
   1 s    1    0    0   0  66   1 u                init         load
   2 s    2    0    0   0  95   0 kspt1+0x10bbdc   vhand        load sys lock nwak nxec
   3 s    3    0    0   0  81   0 kspt1+0xfe64c    bdflush      load sys lock nwak nxec
   4 s    4    1    1   0  95   0 vm_dma_end+0x11cc8 kmadaemon  load sys lock nwak nxec
   5 s    5    1   11   0  95   0 kspt1+0xcbdc8    htepi_daemon load sys lock nwak nxec
   6 s    6    1   16   0  95  22 pbintrpool       strd         load sys lock nwak nxec
   7 s  289    1  289   0  73   0 proc+0x968       ksh          load

The kernel daemons sched (swapper), init (process spawner), vhand (page handler), bdflush (buffer flusher), kmadaemon (kernel memory allocator), always occupy slots 0 through 4. htepi_daemon (HTFS filesystem daemon), and strd (STREAMS daemon) may not be present on your system.

Output columns of interest include:

ST

Shows the process status. These are lowercase equivalents of the process state indicators documented on the ps(C) manual page. For example, s means the process is paused or sleeping on some resource, r represents a process that is ready to run, and o is a process that is running on a CPU.

PRI

Shows the priority of the process. Note that on configurations that use the fixed priority scheduler, 127 is the highest priority and 0 is the lowest priority. User mode processes have priorities from 0 to 65, system mode processes have priorities from 66 to 95, and fixed priority schedule process priorities range from 96 to 127. (Priority 51 is the default priority for user-level processes.)

EVENT

Shows the event (symbol name and offset, or an address) on which a process is paused or sleeping.

FLAGS

Shows the process flags. For definitions of these flags, see the listing in the <sys/proc.h> header file. Note that crash displays the flags as all lowercase; it also removes the initial ``S'' and some additional letters. For example, the flag shown by crash as nxec and nwak are defined as SNEXEC and SNWAKE in <sys/proc.h>.