illumos gate

In "mdb -k", I had a pointer to a list of 48M taskq entries. When I do this:

> PTR::list taskq_ent_t tqent_next

even though the list is extremely long, mdb starts printing them out immediately. With the built-in pager, you get a prompt allowing you to abort the listing early, which you'd typically do, since it would take so long to list the whole thing. This is good.

However, if I pipe that to another dcmd, like this:

PTR::list taskq_ent_t tqent_next | ::print taskq_ent_t tqent_func

Now I get no output for many minutes, and mdb can't even be stopped with CTRL-C. Profiling mdb, it's spending most of its time here:

              libc.so.1`strcmp+0x1a
              mdb`mdb_gelf_symtab_lookup_by_name+0x3f
              mdb`kt_lookup_by_name+0xb2
              mdb`mdb_tgt_lookup_by_name+0x112
              mdb`yylex+0x756
              mdb`yyparse+0x3ad
              mdb`mdb_run+0x2cd
              mdb`runsvc+0x11
              mdb`context_init+0x1e
              libc.so.1`resumecontext
              mdb`0x42c3a2
              mdb`pio_write+0x12a
              mdb`iob_write+0x63
              mdb`mdb_iob_flush+0x57
              mdb`mdb_iob_nl+0x37
              mdb`mdb_iob_nputs+0x4c
              mdb`iob_doprnt+0xace
              mdb`mdb_iob_vprintf+0x43
              mdb`mdb_printf+0xae
              mdb`cmd_list+0x13e
              155

Stopping it with another instance of mdb, we found that the symbol being looked up was a pointer address -- that's "::print" parsing the output of "::list". In about 10 seconds, mdb_tgt_lookup_by_name() was invoked 424,317 times.

It would be nice if in this mode, mdb did what it does without the pipeline, which is to start outputting right away and give you the opportunity to abort the pipeline.