.\"
.\" mono manual page.
.\" Copyright 2003 Ximian, Inc.
-.\" Copyright 2004-2009 Novell, Inc.
+.\" Copyright 2004-2011 Novell, Inc.
.\" Author:
.\" Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)
.\"
-.TH Mono "Mono 2.5"
+.TH Mono "Mono 2.11"
.SH NAME
mono \- Mono's ECMA-CLI native code generator (Just-in-Time and Ahead-of-Time)
.SH SYNOPSIS
consoles).
.TP
.I static
-Create an ELF object file (.o) which can be statically linked into an executable
-when embedding the mono runtime. When this option is used, the object file needs to
-be registered with the embedded runtime using the mono_aot_register_module function
-which takes as its argument the mono_aot_module_<ASSEMBLY NAME>_info global symbol
-from the object file:
+Create an ELF object file (.o) or .s file which can be statically linked into an
+executable when embedding the mono runtime. When this option is used, the object file
+needs to be registered with the embedded runtime using the mono_aot_register_module
+function which takes as its argument the mono_aot_module_<ASSEMBLY NAME>_info global
+symbol from the object file:
.nf
extern void *mono_aot_module_hello_info;
mono_aot_register_module (mono_aot_module_hello_info);
.fi
.ne
+.TP
+.I mtriple=<TRIPLE>
+Use the GNU style target triple <TRIPLE> to determine some code generation options, i.e.
+--mtriple=armv7-linux-gnueabi will generate code that targets ARMv7. This is currently
+only supported by the ARM backend. In LLVM mode, this triple is passed on to the LLVM
+llc compiler.
+.TP
+.I tool-prefix=<PREFIX>
+Prepends <PREFIX> to the name of tools ran by the AOT compiler, i.e. 'as'/'ld'. For
+example, --tool=prefix=arm-linux-gnueabi- will make the AOT compiler run
+'arm-linux-gnueabi-as' instead of 'as'.
+.TP
+.I llvm-path=<PREFIX>
+Same for the llvm tools 'opt' and 'llc'.
+.TP
+.I stats
+Print various stats collected during AOT compilation.
.PP
For more information about AOT, see: http://www.mono-project.com/AOT
.Sp
Used to specify the file where the log will be stored, it defaults to
standard output.
+.TP
+.I server=[y/n]
+Defaults to no, with the default option Mono will actively connect to the
+host/port configured with the \fBaddress\fR option. If you set it to 'y', it
+instructs the Mono runtime to start debugging in server mode, where Mono
+actively waits for the debugger front end to connect to the Mono process.
+Mono will print out to stdout the IP address and port where it is listening.
.ne
.RE
.TP
and code coverage see the sections "PROFILING" and "CODE COVERAGE"
below.
.TP
+This option can be used multiple times, each time will load an
+additional profiler. This allows developers to use modules that
+extend the JIT through the Mono profiling interface.
+.TP
\fB--trace[=expression]\fR
Shows method names as they are invoked. By default all methods are
traced.
be the preferred profiler to use (for better output use the full path
to the mono binary when running and make sure you have installed the
addr2line utility that comes from the binutils package).
-.SH LOGGING PROFILER
-.PP
-The
-.I logging profiler
-is a general purpose profiler that can track many different kinds of
-events and logs those into a file as the program executes. This is
-different than previous profilers in Mono that kept the information in
-memory and rendered a summary of the results when the program shut
-down.
-.PP
-Using the logging profiler means that useful information can be
-gathered for long-running applications, applications that terminate
-abormally (crashes, segfaults, complicated tear down processes) or
-when no data about the shutdown is required.
-.PP
-The data collected by the running threads is kept independent of each
-other to minimize the runtime overhead and the information dumped into
-the log at regular intervals.
-.PP
-A sample use is very simple:
-.nf
- $ mono --profile=logging program.exe
-
- $ mprof-decoder program.mprof
-.fi
-.PP
-In the above example the logging profiler is used in its default mode
-that merely records GC statistics for the execution of program.exe.
-The profiling data collected is stored in the file program.mprof. The
-mprof-decoder tool is then used to analyze the data.
-.PP
-You can instruct the logging profiler to record different one or more
-sets of events. These are the modes supported:
-.IP
-.I Statistical Profiling (stat)
-the program instruction pointer is periodically sampled to determine
-where the program is spending most of its time. Statistical
-profiling has a very low impact on a running application and it is
-very useful to get a general picture of where time is being spent on a
-program.
-.IP
-If call chains are requested, for each sample the profiler gets a
-partial stack trace (limited by the specified depth) so that
-caller-callee information is available.
-.IP
-.I Instrumenting:
-each method enter and exit is logged with a timestamp; further processing of
-the data can show the methods that took the longer to execute, with complete
-accounting for callers and callees. However, this way of profiling is rather
-intrusive and slows down the application significantly.
-.IP
-.I Allocation:
-each allocation is logged.
-.IP
-.I Allocation summary:
-shows, for each collection, a summary of the heap contents broken down by
-class (for each class the number of allocated and released objects is
-given, together with their aggregated size in bytes).
-.IP
-.I Heap snapshot mode:
-dumps the whole heap contents at every collection (or at user specified
-collections). It is also possible to request a collection and snapshot dump
-with a signal.
-.PP
-Moreover, other events can be logged and analyzed, like jit time for each
-method, load and unload for assemblies, modules and and individual classes,
-and appdomain and thread creation and destruction.
-.PP
-This profiler is activated passing the \fB--profile=logging\fR option to
-the mono runtime, and is controlled attaching further options, like
-\fB--profile=logging:statistical\fR for doing statistical profiling (multiple
-options are separated by commas).
-.PP
-As a quick primer, here are a few examples of the most common usage modes:
-.PP
-To perform statistical profiling:
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:stat program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-To perform statistical profiling, inspecting call chains up to depth 8:
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:stat=8 program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-To profile allocations (by default the call stack will be analized for
-each allocation, producing detailed caller method attribution infornation):
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:allocations program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-To profile garbage collection activity at a high level (collection time and objects freed
-at each collection for each class are reported, but heap snapshots are not saved to disk):
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:allocations-summary program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-To perform heap profiling taking heap snapshots:
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:heap=all program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-To write the resulting data to a different file:
-.nf
-
- mono --profile=logging:output=mydata.mprof program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-Then you would need to invoke the decoder \fImprof-decoder(1)\fR
-on the output file to see the profiling results, or to examine heap
-snapshots and allocations in detail \fImprof-heap-viewer(1)\fR.
-.PP
-The operating modes described above are the default ones, and are sufficient
-to use the profiler.
-.PP
-To further customize the profiler behavior there are more options, described
-below.
-.PP
-These options can be individually enabled and disabled prefixing them
-with an (optional) '+' character or a '-' character. For instance,
-the "allocations" option by default records also the full call stack
-at each allocation. If only the caller is wanted, one should use
-"allocations,-save-allocation-stack", or to disable call tracking
-completely (making the profiler less intrusive)
-"allocations,-save-allocation-caller,-save-allocation-stack". In
-practice the "allocation" option by default behaves like
-"allocations,save-allocation-caller,save-allocation-stack", but the
-user can tune this to his needs.
-.PP
-These are all the available options, organized by category:
-.PP
-\fBExecution profiling modes\fR
-.RS
-.ne 8
-.TP
-\fIstatistical\fR, \fIstat\fR or \fIs\fR
-Performs statistical profiling. This is a lightweight profiling
-mechanism and it has a much lower overhead than the \fIenter-leave\fR
-profiling as it works by sampling where the program is spending its
-time by using a timer.
-If specified with \fIs=<number>\fR, also inspect call chains up to level
-<number>.
-.TP
-\fIenter-leave\fR, \fIcalls\fR or \fIc\fR
-Measure the time spent inside each method call, this is done by
-logging the time when a method enters and when the method leaves.
-This can be a time consuming operation.
-.TP
-\fIjit\fR, \fIj\fR
-Collect information about time spent by the JIT engine compiling
-methods.
-.ne
-.RE
-.PP
-\fBAllocation profiling modes\fR
-.RS
-.ne 8
-.TP
-\fIallocations\fR, \fIalloc\fR or \fIa\fR
-Collect information about each allocation (object class and size).
-By default this also implies "+save-allocation-caller" and
-"+save-allocation-stack".
-.TP
-\fIsave-allocation-caller\fR, \fIsac\fR
-Save the direct caller of each allocation. The profiler filters out wrapper
-methods, and also recognizes if the allocation has been performed by the
-runtime while jitting a method.
-.TP
-\fIsave-allocation-stack\fR, \fIsas\fR
-Save the full managed execution stack at each allocation.
-While the "sac" option saves the direct caller, this one records the whole
-stack trace.
-Note that in the call stack the wrapper methods are not filtered out.
-Anyway the "sac" and "sas" options can be combined, and the decoder will
-attribute the allocation to the correct method even if the wrapper is at the
-top of the stack trace.
-.TP
-\fIallocations-summary\fR or \fIas\fR
-At each collection dump a summary
-of the heap contents (for each class, the number and collective size of all
-live and freed heap objects). This very lightweight compared to full heap
-snapshots.
-.TP
-\fIunreachable\fR, \fIfree\fR or \fIf\fR
-Performs a lightweight profile of the garbage collector. On each
-collection performed by the GC, the list of unreachable objects is
-recorded, and for each object the class and size is provided. This
-information can be used to compute the heap size broken down by class
-(combined with "a" can give the same information of "as", but the log
-file contains info about each individual object, while in "as" the
-processing is done directly at runtime and the log file contains only
-the summarized data broken down by class).
-.TP
-\fIgc\fR or \fIg\fR
-Measure the time spent in each collection, and also trace heap resizes.
-.TP
-\fIheap-shot[=ARG]\fR, \fIheap[=ARG]\fR or \fIh[=ARH]\fR
-Performs full heap profiling. In this case on each
-collection a full heap snapshot is recorded to disk.
-Inside the snapshots, each object reference is still represented so
-that it's possible to investigate who is responsible for keeping objects
-alive.
-.PP
-If the value of ARG is
-.B all,
-a heap snapshot is taken at each collection.
-.PP
-If the value is an integer
-.B n,
-a snapshot will be taken at the first
-.B n
-collections (like setting
-.B gcd=n
-);
-.PP
-If no additional argument is given to the heap option, the only way to take
-heap snapshots is to requeste them using the runtime socket based command
-interface described below (see "Profiler activity control").
-.PP
-Heap profiling also enables full allocation profiling (with call
-stacks), and each allocation can be related to its corresponding
-object in the snapshots, enabling investigations like "find all
-objects of a given class allocated by a given method and still live at
-a given collection, and then find all objects referencing them".
-.PP
-This kind of heap snapshot analysis is performed using the mprof-heap-viewer(1)
-application.
-.PP
-The number of heap snapshots taken (and the moment in which they are taken)
-can be further customized with the following options:
-.TP
-\fIgc-dumps=N\fR, \fIgc-d=N\fR, \fIgcd=N\fR
-states the number of snapshots that must be dumped (since the application
-starts). Zero means no dumps at all, -1 means dump at all collections.
-.TP
-These options exist because it can happen that the user wants to investigate
-what happens during collections but without forcing a collection using the
-command interface, because forcing a collection alters the program behavior.
-Of course it is possible to simply take a snapshot at every collection, but
-in some workloads this is could not be feasible (too much data).
-So we have this "garbage collection dumps" counter to control how many
-snapshots to take.
-.ne
-.RE
-.PP
-\fBProfiler activity control\fR
-.RS
-.ne 8
-.TP
-\fIoutput=FILE\fR, \fIout=FILE\fR or \fIo=FILE\fR
-Use this option to provide the output file name for the profile log.
-If this option is not specified, it will default to "<program-name>.mprof".
-.TP
-\fIoutput-suffix=SUFFIX\fR, \fIsuffix=SUFFIX\fR or \fIos=SUFFIX\fR: makes
-the output file name equals to "<program-name>-SUFFIX.mprof".
-.TP
-\fIstart-enabled\fR or \fIse\fR: start with the profiler active
-(which is the default).
-.TP
-\fIstart-disabled\fR or \fIsd\fR: start with the profiler inactive.
-.TP
-\fIforce-accurate-timer\fR (or \fIfac\fR): the profiler by default uses
-rtdsc to acquire timestamps for frequent events, but this can be imprecise;
-using this option you force the use of "gettimeofday" at every event, which
-is more accurate but much slower.
-.TP
-\fIcommand-port=port\fR or \fIcp=port\fR (where port is an integer between
-1024 nd 65535):
-Choose a TCP port where the profiler will listen for user commands.
-The protocol is ASCII based and line oriented (one line per command), and the
-profiler answers with one line containing either "OK" or "ERROR" to each
-received command.
-.PP
-The user can telnet to this port and give commands manually, or a GUI can
-use this facility to control the profiler at runtime.
-.PP
-The available commands are:
-.TP
-\fIenable\fR: Enables the profiler.
-.TP
-\fIdisable\fR: Disables the profiler.
-.TP
-\fIheap-snapshot\fR: Takes a heap snapshot now (forces a full garbage collection).
-.TP
-\fIheap-snapshot-counter=arg\fR: Set the counter of the next heap snapshots
-that must be taken, where arg can be "all" (take a snapshot at every
-collection), "none" (do not take snapshots), or an integer "n" (take a heap
-snapshot for the next "n" collections).
-.ne
-.RE
-.PP
-\fBInternal buffer sizes\fR
-.RS
-.ne 8
-.TP
-\fIper-thread-buffer-size=N\fR, \fItbs=N\fR
-Use to specify the number of events that a thread buffer
-can hold. When the thread buffer is full, a log block is
-written to disk.
-.Sp
-This defaults to tbs=10000.
-.TP
-\fIstatistical-thread-buffer-size=N\fR, \fIsbs=N\fR
-The number of statistical samples that
-are held in memory before they are dumped to disk (the system does
-double-buffering and the statistical samples are written by a helper
-thread, so the statistical profiler never stops and is able to profile
-the profiler itself).
-.Sp
-This defaults to sbs=10000.
-.TP
-\fIwrite-buffer-size\fR, \fIwbs\fR
-Specifies the size in bytes of the internal write buffers.
-.Sp
-This defaults to wbs=1024.
-.ne
-.RE
-.PP
-In its current state, this profiler can also perform heap analysis
-like the HeapShot profiler, but there is no UI to process this
-information.
-.PP
-Another known issue is that if the timer is not strictly monotonic (like
-rtdsc), differences between times can underflow (they are handled as
-unsigned integers) and weird numbers can show up in the logs.
-.PP
-Finally, it can happen that when exceptions are thrown the profiler temporarily
-loses track of the execution stack and misattributes the caller for a few
-allocations (and method execution time).
-.PP
-The output file contains compressed events, to process the data you should
-use tools like the "Mono.Profiler" tool provided on the Mono SVN
-repository.
-.PP
-More explanations are provided here: "http://www.mono-project.com/LoggingProfiler".
-.SH EXTERNAL PROFILERS
-There are a number of external profilers that have been developed for
-Mono, we will update this section to contain the profilers.
-.PP
-The heap Shot profiler can track all live objects, and references to
-these objects, and includes a GUI tool, this is our recommended
-profiler.
-To install you must download the profiler
-from Mono's SVN:
-.nf
- svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/heap-shot
- cd heap-shot
- ./autogen
- make
- make install
-.fi
-.PP
-See the included documentation for details on using it.
-.PP
-The Live Type profiler shows at every GC iteration all of the live
-objects of a given type. To install you must download the profiler
-from Mono's SVN:
-.nf
- svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/heap-prof
- cd heap-prof
- ./autogen
- make
- make install
-.fi
-.PP
-To use the profiler, execute:
-.nf
- mono --profile=desc-heap program.exe
-.fi
-.PP
-The output of this profiler looks like this:
-.nf
- Checkpoint at 102 for heap-resize
- System.MonoType : 708
- System.Threading.Thread : 352
- System.String : 3230
- System.String[] : 104
- Gnome.ModuleInfo : 112
- System.Object[] : 160
- System.Collections.Hashtable : 96
- System.Int32[] : 212
- System.Collections.Hashtable+Slot[] : 296
- System.Globalization.CultureInfo : 108
- System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo : 144
-.fi
-.PP
-The first line describes the iteration number for the GC, in this case
-checkpoint 102.
-.PP
-Then on each line the type is displayed as well as the number of bytes
-that are being consumed by live instances of this object.
-.PP
-The AOT profiler is used to feed back information to the AOT compiler
-about how to order code based on the access patterns for pages. To
-use it, use:
-.nf
- mono --profile=aot program.exe
-.fi
-The output of this profile can be fed back into Mono's AOT compiler to
-order the functions on the disk to produce precompiled images that
-have methods in sequential pages.
+.SH LOG PROFILER
+This is the most advanced profiler.
+.PP
+The Mono \f[I]log\f[] profiler can be used to collect a lot of
+information about a program running in the Mono runtime.
+This data can be used (both while the process is running and later)
+to do analyses of the program behaviour, determine resource usage,
+performance issues or even look for particular execution patterns.
+.PP
+This is accomplished by logging the events provided by the Mono
+runtime through the profiling interface and periodically writing
+them to a file which can be later inspected with the mprof-report(1)
+tool.
+.PP
+More information about how to use the log profiler is available on the
+mprof-report(1) page.
.SH CUSTOM PROFILERS
Mono provides a mechanism for loading other profiling modules which in
the form of shared libraries. These profiling modules can hook up to
write barrier is faster and has a more stable and usually smaller
memory footprint. If the program causes too much pinning during
thread scan, it might be faster to enable remset.
+.TP
+\fBevacuation-threshold=\fIthreshold\fR
+Sets the evacuation threshold in percent. This option is only available
+on the Mark&Sweep major collectors. The value must be an
+integer in the range 0 to 100. The default is 66. If the sweep phase of
+the collection finds that the occupancy of a specific heap block type is
+less than this percentage, it will do a copying collection for that block
+type in the next major collection, thereby restoring occupancy to close
+to 100 percent. A value of 0 turns evacuation off.
+.TP
+\fB(no-)concurrent-sweep\fR
+Enables or disables concurrent sweep for the Mark&Sweep collector. If
+enabled, the sweep phase of the garbage collection is done in a thread
+concurrently with the application. Concurrent sweep is disabled by
+default.
+.TP
+\fBstack-mark=\fImark-mode\fR
+Specifies how application threads should be scanned. Options are
+`precise` and `conservative`. Precise marking allow the collector
+to know what values on stack are references and what are not.
+Conservative marking threats all values as potentially references
+and leave them untouched. Precise marking reduces floating garbage
+and can speed up nursery collection and allocation rate, it has
+the downside of requiring a significant extra memory per compiled
+method. The right option, unfortunately, requires experimentation.
.ne
.RE
.TP
unload the application domains on production systems, it is worth
using this feature).
.TP
+\fBdyn-runtime-invoke\fR
+Instructs the runtime to try to use a generic runtime-invoke wrapper
+instead of creating one invoke wrapper.
+.TP
+\fBgdb\fR
+Equivalent to setting the \fBMONO_XDEBUG\fR variable, this emits
+symbols into a shared library as the code is JITed that can be loaded
+into GDB to inspect symbols.
+.TP
+\fBgen-seq-points\fR
+Automatically generates sequence points where the
+IL stack is empty. These are places where the debugger can set a
+breakpoint.
+.TP
+\fBexplicit-null-checks\fR
+Makes the JIT generate an explicit NULL check on variable dereferences
+instead of depending on the operating system to raise a SIGSEGV or
+another form of trap event when an invalid memory location is
+accessed.
+.TP
\fBhandle-sigint\fR
Captures the interrupt signal (Control-C) and displays a stack trace
when pressed. Useful to find out where the program is executing at a
given point. This only displays the stack trace of a single thread.
.TP
+\fBinit-stacks\FR
+Instructs the runtime to initialize the stack with
+some known values (0x2a on x86-64) at the start of a method to assist
+in debuggin the JIT engine.
+.TP
\fBkeep-delegates\fR
This option will leak delegate trampolines that are no longer
referenced as to present the user with more information about a
after a SIGSEGV or SIGABRT in unmanaged code.
.TP
\fBsuspend-on-sigsegv\fR
-
This option will suspend the program when a native SIGSEGV is received.
This is useful for debugging crashes which do not happen under gdb,
since a live process contains more information than a core file.
\fBMONO_XDEBUG\fR
When the the MONO_XDEBUG env var is set, debugging info for JITted
code is emitted into a shared library, loadable into gdb. This enables,
-for example, to see managed frame names on gdb backtraces.
+for example, to see managed frame names on gdb backtraces.
.TP
\fBMONO_VERBOSE_METHOD\fR
Enables the maximum JIT verbosity for the specified method. This is
.SH SEE ALSO
.PP
certmgr(1), csharp(1), mcs(1), mdb(1), monocov(1), monodis(1),
-mono-config(5), mozroots(1), pdb2mdb(1), xsp(1), mod_mono(8).
+mono-config(5), mozroots(1), mprof-report(1), pdb2mdb(1), xsp(1), mod_mono(8).
.PP
For more information on AOT:
http://www.mono-project.com/AOT
projects / mono.git / blobdiff