TotalView Users Guide - CI Wiki

‘All’ Does Not Always Mean ‘All’
Setting Group Focus
When you use stepping commands, TotalView determines the scope of
what runs and what stops by looking at the TOI. This section looks at the
differences in behavior when you use the a (all) arena specifier. The following
table describes what runs when you use this arena:
Specifier Specifies
aC All threads.
aS All threads.
aW All threads in all workers groups.
aL All threads.
Every thread is a member of a control group and a member of a
share group and a member of a lockstep group. Consequently,
three of these definitions mean “all threads.”
The following are some combinations:
f aC dgo Runs everything. If you’re using the dgo command, everything
after the a is ignored: a/aPizza/17.2, ac, aS, and
aL do the same thing. TotalView runs everything.
f aC duntil While everything runs, TotalView must wait until something
reaches a goal. It really isn’t obvious what this focus
is. Since C is a process group, you might guess that
all processes run until at least one thread in every participating
process arrives at a goal. The reality is that
since this goal must reside in the current share group,
this command completes as soon as all processes in
the TOI share group have at least one thread at the
goal. Processes in other control groups run freely until
this happens.
The TOI determines the goal. If there are other control
groups, they do not participate in the goal.
f aS duntil This command does the same thing as the f aC duntil
command because the goals for f aC duntil and f aS
duntil are the same, and the processes that are in this
scope are identical.
Although more than one share group can exist in a
control group, these other share groups do not participate
in the goal.
f aL duntil Although everything will run, it is not clear what should
occur. L is a thread group, so you might expect that the
duntil command will wait until all threads in all lockstep
groups arrive at the goal. Instead, TotalView defines the
set of threads that it allows to run to a goal as just
those thread in the TOI’ lockstep group. Although there
are other lockstep groups, these lockstep groups do
not participate in the goal. So, while the TOI’s lockstep
threads are progressing towards their goal, all threads
that were previously stopped run freely.
TotalView Users Guide: version 8.7 267