February 2004
Intermediate to advanced
383 pages
11h 49m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, Second Edition
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Kernel Utilities
Mac OS X includes various utilities that interact with the kernel. With these utilities, you can debug a running kernel, load and unload kernel modules or extensions, or set kernel variables.
ddb
The ddb utility can debug a running kernel. It is not included with the current version of Mac OS X. If you want to use ddb, you can find its source code in the xnu (Darwin kernel) source code (http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/).
ktrace
Use
ktrace to perform kernel tracing (tracing
system calls and other operations)
on a process. To launch a program and
generate a kernel trace (ktrace.out, which is
not human-readable), use ktrace
command, as in ktrace
emacs. Kernel tracing ends when you exit the process or
disable tracing with ktrace -cp
pid. You can get human readable output
from a ktrace file with
kdump.
Kernel Module Utilities
The following list describes utilities for manipulating kernel modules. For more information, see the kernel extension tutorials available at http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/documentation/howto. These utilities must be run with superuser privileges:
- kextload
Loads an extension bundle.
-
kextunload Unloads an extension bundle.
- kextstat
Displays the status of currently loaded kernel extensions. Table 15-5 describes this utility’s output. Figure 15-6 shows sample output.
Table 15-5. Information displayed by kextstat
|
Item number |
Column |
Description |
|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Index |
Index number of the loaded extension. Extensions are loaded ... |
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