TotalView Users Guide - CI Wiki

Specifying Arenas
Setting Process and Thread Focus
A P/T identifier often indicates a number of groups, processes, and threads.
For example, assume that two threads executing in process 2 are stopped
at the same statement. This means that TotalView places the two stopped
threads into lockstep groups. If the default focus is process 2, stepping this
process actually steps both of these threads.
TotalView uses the term arena to define the processes and threads that are
the target of an action. In this case, the arena has two threads. Many CLI
commands can act on one or more arenas. For example, the following
command has two arenas:
dfocus {p1 p2}
The two arenas are process 1 and process 2.
When there is an arena list, each arena in the list has its own GOI, POI, and
TOI.
Specifying Processes and Threads
The previous sections described P/T sets as being lists; however, these discussions
ignored what the individual elements of the list are. A better definition
is that a P/T set is a list of arenas, where an arena consists of the processes,
threads, and groups that are affected by a debugging command.
Each arena specifier describes a single arena in which a command acts; the
list is just a collection of arenas. Most commands iterate over the list, acting
individually on an arena. Some CLI output commands, however, combine
arenas and act on them as a single target.
An arena specifier includes a width and a TOI. (Widths are discussed later in
this section.) In the P/T set, the TOI specifies a target thread, while the width
specifies how many threads surrounding the thread of interest are affected.
Defining the Thread of Interest (TOI)
The TOI is specified as p.t, where p is the TotalView process ID (PID) and t is
the TotalView thread ID (TID). The p.t combination identifies the POI (Process
of Interest) and TOI. The TOI is the primary thread affected by a command.
This means that it is the primary focus for a TotalView command. For
example, while the dstep command always steps the TOI, it can run the rest
of the threads in the POI and step other processes in the group.
In addition to using numerical values, you can also use two special symbols:
� The less-than character (