I am running the following command on my ubuntu server
root@slot13:~# lxc-stop --name pavan --logfile=test1.txt --logpriority=trace
It seems to hang indefinitely. Whenever this happened on AIX, I simply used to get the PID of the offending process and say
$ procstack <pid_of_stuck_process>
and it used to show the whole callstack of the process. Is there any equivalent of procstack in linux/ubuntu?
My first step would be to run strace on the process, best
strace -s 99 -ffp 12345
if your process ID is 12345. This will show you all syscalls the program is doing. How to strace a process tells you more.
If you insist on getting a stacktrace, google tells me the equivalent is pstack. But as I do not have it installed I use gdb:
tweedleburg:~ # sleep 3600 &
[2] 2621
tweedleburg:~ # gdb
(gdb) attach 2621
(gdb) bt
#0 0x00007feda374e6b0 in __nanosleep_nocancel () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1 0x0000000000403ee7 in ?? ()
#2 0x0000000000403d70 in ?? ()
#3 0x000000000040185d in ?? ()
#4 0x00007feda36b8b05 in __libc_start_main () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#5 0x0000000000401969 in ?? ()
(gdb)
Two answers have been given for finding the stack trace of a program (remember to install debugging symbols first!). If you want to find out where a system call got stuck, examine /proc/PID/stack, which lists the kernel stack. Example:
$ cat /proc/self/stack
[<ffffffff81012b72>] save_stack_trace_tsk+0x22/0x40
[<ffffffff81213abe>] proc_pid_stack+0x8e/0xe0
[<ffffffff81214960>] proc_single_show+0x50/0x90
[<ffffffff811cd970>] seq_read+0xe0/0x3e0
[<ffffffff811a6a84>] vfs_read+0x94/0x180
[<ffffffff811a7729>] SyS_read+0x49/0xb0
[<ffffffff81623ad2>] system_call_fastpath+0x16/0x1b
[<ffffffffffffffff>] 0xffffffffffffffff
/proc/pid/wchan and the WCHAN column in ps -l output or ps -o wchan for the top of that stack. (the ps part works on many Unices, but is not always (often) useful in itself).
– Stéphane Chazelas
Dec 12 '14 at 12:31
On most unix systems, you can use GDB.
gdb -batch -ex bt -p 1234
There's also pstack (not a standard utility, you'll probably have to install it manually). It looks like an equivalent of AIX's procstack. But on my Debian wheezy amd64, it seems to always error out. On i386, for a program compiled without debugging symbols, it doesn't print any symbol, not even from libraries for which debugging symbols are available.
You can also use strace -p1234 to see the system calls performed by the process.
pstack seems to be throwing errors everytime. Something like root@sarai:~# pstack 6312 6312: /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/twistd -n --uid=maas --gid=maas --pidfile=/run/maas-pserv.pid --logfile=/dev/null maas-pserv --conf... (No symbols found) crawl: Input/output error Error tracing through process 6312
– Pavan Manjunath
Nov 7 '14 at 20:53
pstack seems to be broken on amd64, I observe the same on Debian wheezy amd64.
– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
Nov 7 '14 at 21:00
pstack will print a stack trace of a running process for you. gstack is a common equivalent if pstack is not available / doesn't support your distro/arch.
