Arenas and P/T Sets
Many debugger commands operate on a thread, process, or group based on the defined arena, i.e., the target, or focus, provided to a command. An arena in TotalView is comprised of a group, a specific process and thread, and a width indicator to define the subset that should be affected by a command.
Arenas are contained within P/T sets, which are lists that can contain any number of arenas.
Arena Specifiers in a P/T Set
A P/T set in the CLI is a Tcl list, usually enclosed in curly braces ({ }), and composed of a list of arena specifiers, or a P/T expression composed of arena specifiers and operators. An arena defines a collection of processes and threads that are the target of an action. Many CLI commands can act on one or more arenas. For example, the following dfocus command uses two arena specifiers to set the focus on two arenas: process 1 and process 2:
dfocus {p1 p2}
TotalView identifies one thread in the arena as the thread of interest (TOI). However, the collection defined by the arena actually includes all the processes and threads in the group associated with the arena, i.e., the group of interest (GOI).
An arena specifier includes a
width and a TOI. (Widths are discussed in detail in
Process and Thread Width Specifiers in a P/T Set.) It may also include a group. In an arena, the TOI specifies a target thread, while the width identifies a subset of the collection of processes and threads to be affected by the command.
For a P/T set that contains multiple arenas, most commands iterate over each arena and act specifically on each. Some CLI output commands, however, combine arenas and act on them as a single target.
