Remote Debugging

PyPy has an experimental remote debugging facility built into the virtual machine. It can be used to inject arbitrary Python code into another PyPy process. So far, it works only under Linux. This mechanism is strongly inspired by PEP 768.

From the commandline

To directly execute Python code in another PyPy process, you can run this command:

pypy -m _pypy_remote_debug <pid> -c <code>

This will cause the other PyPy process with process id pid the to execute the code given.

Alternatively you can pass a script file:

pypy -m _pypy_remote_debug <pid> <filename>

If the other process is currently blocked by a system call or running a long-running computation in a C extension, it will not be interrupted. In this case the script will be executed once that is finished.

For example, to cause the other process to dump its (RPython-level) heap, you can run:

pypy -m _pypy_remote_debug -c "import gc; gc.dump_rpy_heap('/tmp/rpy-heap-dump')"

API

To execute code remotely from Python code, there is the function __pypy__.remote_exec(pid, filename, wait=True).

Security

This feature is implemented by writing to the heap memory of another process. Under Linux, it uses the process_vm_writev function. This function is disabled by default on most hardened Linux distributions by Yama. Therefore you might need sudo to run the above commands.

The feature can be disable by running PyPy with the -X disable-remote-debug option, or setting the PYTHON_DISABLE_REMOTE_DEBUG environment variable.