Re: What is System.map for?

Nelson Minar (nelson@media.mit.edu)
15 Jan 1997 17:55:06 -0500

dpates@Cavern.NMSU.Edu (Derrik Pates) writes:
> > Can anyone give me some ideas and/or reference about System.map?
> If you aren't using modules, I don't think it's used unless you are
> doing debugging, or stack traces and such. Might want to keep it
> around tho.

No, it's also used by ps to resolve WCHAN in "ps -xl".

The situation is awkward if you have the wrong version of System.map
in /boot and you run "ps -xl". It will resolve the WCHAN numbers to
names, but the names will be wrong. Very confusing. I agitated to
include a step about copying System.map to the right place in the
kernel install documentation / scripts, but I don't think it happened.