Backtrace virtual machine processes

When a process related to a virtual machine (VM) malfunctions, you can use the gstack command along with the process identifier (PID) to generate an execution stack trace of the malfunctioning process. If the process is a part of a thread group, then all the threads are traced as well.

Before you begin

  • Ensure that the GDB package is installed.

    For details about installing GDB and the available components, see Installing the GNU Debugger.

  • Make sure you know the PID of the processes that you want to backtrace.

    You can find the PID by using the pgrep command followed by the name of the process. For example:

    # pgrep libvirt
     
    22014
22025

Procedure

Use the gstack utility followed by the PID of the process you want to backtrace.

For example, the following command backtraces the libvirt process with the PID 22014.

# gstack 22014
 
Thread 3 (Thread 0x7f33edaf7700 (LWP 22017)):
#0  0x00007f33f81aef21 in poll () from /lib64/libc.so.6
#1  0x00007f33f89059b6 in g_main_context_iterate.isra () from /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
#2  0x00007f33f8905d72 in g_main_loop_run () from /lib64/libglib-2.0.so.0
...

For more information about using gstack, see the gstack man page on your system.