[erlang-questions] beginner: Help needed - Erts overview and map to subsystem to source

[G Bulmer]

Bjorn

Thank you very much for the pointers, especially the tip on R11B ->  
R12B garbage collector change.

Are the HiPE papers you suggest at:
http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/publications.shtml and
http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/documentation.shtml

Do you know, is the HiPE memory management system the same as/similar  
to the 'normal' Erlang run-time, making "Efficient Memory Management  
for Message-Passing Concurrency" a good place to start?

Garry

> G Bulmer <gbulmer@REDACTED> writes:
>> Can someone point me at any documents which describes the internal
>> architecture of erts? Ideally it would help me navigate the code too.
>>
>> For example is there a document which gives an overview of erts
>> subsystems? (ideally also a "table of contents" mapping the
>> subsystems to the files which contain the corresponding code, but if
>> the names are consistent, I can use grep.)
>>
>
> As far as I know, there are no such documents. (Though some  
> architectual
> overviews can be found in some the papers from the HiPE group.)

>> I guess I need to find the code for the garbage collector, erts
>> function tracing (which I would try to use for the DTrace function
>> call probes), the scheduler, and the module loader/unloader. I'll
>> also need to discover approximately how they work !-)
>>
>
> Very brief overview:
>
> The garbage collector is in erl_gc.c in R12B (ggc.c in R11B; that file
> is gone in R12B).
>
> (Local) call trace works by replacing the first instruction in  
> function
> with a breakpoint instruction. The breakpoint instruction is called
> "call_traced_function" in beam_emu.c. Most of the other code for  
> tracing
> is in erl_trace.c and erl_bif_trace.c. (beam_emu.c contains the
> virtual machine for BEAM.)
>
> The scheduler is in the function schedule() in erl_process.c.
>
> The loader is in beam_bif_load.c (the loader BIFs) and beam_load.c
> (the bulk of the code).
>