PSUPDATE (8)
update the ps database of kernel offsets
SYNOPSIS
psupdate [path to uncompressed kernel image]
DESCRIPTION
psupdate updates the /etc/psdatabase file to correspond to the
current kernel image system map file,
/usr/src/linux/vmlinux by default.
If your system map file is not /usr/src/linux/vmlinux, you may give the
name of an alternate map file on the command line. This is the only
argument currently supported.
FILES
/etc/psdatabase
/usr/src/linux/vmlinux
NOTE
The database produced by this version of psupdate is not compatible with
the one produced by the kmem-based psupdate. The procps version does
not need some of the things contained in the kmemps database, so the
procps database is slightly smaller and has a different "magic" string.
Also, the kmem-based version (as of v1.2.9) is not quite as up-to-date
in some respects. If, for some obscure reason, you want to use both the
proc- and kmem-based versions of the ps suites, you should keep two
different databases and update both of them at boot (or
kernel-compilation) time. (Please note that kmemps, by default, puts
its database in a different place anyway: /var/run.)
The ps command does not absolutely need the /etc/psdatabase file.
If it is missing, then ps will examine the System.map file, if it
can find it (see ps(1)). If it cannot find the psdatabase
or the System.map file, it will simply be unable to put symbolic
information in the WCHAN field.
SEE ALSO
AUTHORS
Original code written by Branko Lankaster, horribly munged by Michael
K. Johnson in a desperate effort to add WCHAN support to
procps. Jeff Uphoff added the code to handle ELF-compiled kernels and
rewrote much of the other code. David Mossberger-Tang wrote the generic
BFD support.