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# Overview

The goal of the frysk project is to create an intelligent, distributed, always-on system monitoring and debugging tool that allows developers and system administrators to monitor running processes and threads (including creation and destruction events), monitor the use of locking primitives, expose deadlocks, gather data and debug any given process by either choosing it from a list or by accepting frysk's offer to open a source code or other window on a process that is in the process of crashing or that has been misbehaving in certain user-definable ways.

frysk is free software and so is generally and freely available as both a research and development platform.

## News

## Release

### 0.2.1

We, that is, Adam Jocksch, Alexandre Oliva, Andrew Cagney, Carlos Eduardo Seo, Chris Moller, Diego Novillo, Elena Zannoni, Frank Ch. Eigler, Igor Foox, Ivan Pantuyev, Jan Kratochvil, Jeff Johnston, Jose Flavio Paulino, Kris Van Hees, Len DiMaggio, Mark Wielaard, Mike Behm, Mike Cvet, Nurdin Premji, Petr Machata, Phil Muldoon, Richard Henderson, Rick Moseley, Sami Wagiaalla, Stan Cox, Stepan Kasal, Tarun Khanna, Teresa Thomas, Thomas Girard, Tim Moore, Tom Tromey, Wu Zhou, Yao Qi, Yong Zheng, and Zhao Shujing are pleased to announce our first official release of Frysk, version 0.2.1.

This initial release includes:

- command line utilities:
  fauxv - print the auxiliary vector
  fcatch - catch and print the stack of a crashing process
  fcore - extract a core file from a running process
  fdebuginfo - list debug-info requirements of a process
  fdebugrpm - install debug-info requirements of a process
  ferror - catch and back-trace error calls
  fexe - print the executable path
  fmaps - print the address map
  fstack - print each thread's stack
  fstep - single-step a process
  ftrace - trace a processes system and (new) library calls
  Known limitations: large resident set size; large executable size.
- Prototype command line debugger: fhpd
  For single threaded programs, FHPD can: print the value, type, and location, and modify the value of, arbitrarily located variable (complex DWARF location expressions); correctly handle very-large integers (>64-bit) and large floats (80-bit); display in-line information in back-traces; control processes with the commands load, core, dump, run, step, break, go, detach, kill, list, focus.
  In addition to the command-line utility restrictions, the HPD has the following known limitations: disassembler missing; limited type-cast support in expressions; limited multi-thread support.
- Prototype visual debugging and monitoring tool (frysk)
  Known limitations: work-flow limited to live processes (examining core files, or creating processes is possible but very non-intuitive).
- Prototype test-suite (funit)
  Known limitations: some test that are working in-tree fail when installed.

To download this release, go to:

    ftp://sourceware.org/pub/frysk/frysk-0.2.1.tar.bz2

or check for an update in your local GNU/Linux distro.

## Where Next?

UseCases
  Examples of how frysk will be used.
Build
  Instructions on how to download and build frysk.
Demo
  A Flash (800x600 pixels, 3.5MB) demonstration of frysk - driven by a Dogtail automated GUI test script.
WorkFlows
  Illustrations of how frysk works.
Questions
  Some questions with answers.
Get Involved
  How to participate in frysk's development.
Documentation
  Documentation; recommend reading, and useful links.
Bugzilla
  Check the project status; report a problem.