process-map

A linux tool to visualize the virtual memory of a process. Thread activity is drawn as small dots jumping around on the
map (at the instructions they’re executing). The map also shows public symbols from binaries and shared libraries.

Compiling and how to run

To compile just run make:

make

This will download and compile raylib as well (using wget, replace that command in the Makefile with curl if
you don’t have wget available).

sudo ./map PID

Where PID is the id of the process you want to look at (something like 1856). Unfortunately the tools needs root
access to inspect the threads via ptrace(). Otherwise it has no idea what instructions the threads are executing.

Controls

• Left click & drag: Pan around on the map
• Mouse wheel: Zoom in or out. If you get close enough the public symbols will become visible.
• Click on task in the task list: Only shows dots from that task.

Purpose and what it isn’t

The tool is meant to give students an easier and intuitive idea of what a process is. It’s a nice gimmick. That’s it.

It isn’t a profiler or any other serious debugging tool. It doesn’t measure where CPU time is spend (a flame chart will
do a much better job). It just looks at each threads instruction pointer every so often and plots that on the map. The
visualization doesn’t show if the threads are actually doing work or just sitting on their butts (poll() and
pthread_cond_wait() are popular meeting places).

So don’t take what you see to seriously.

Status of the code

The code isn’t pretty. Primarily because I just wanted to try out raylib and ptrace(). If you like the idea and want to
take it further you better start from scratch. Or at least do some major refactoring.