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:
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.
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.
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.
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 threads in the TOI’s 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.
With this in mind, f aL dstep does not step all threads. Instead, it steps only the threads in the TOI’s lockstep group. All other threads run freely until the stepping process for these lockstep threads completes.