Dbx: Articles, news, notes on dbx, the Sun Studio debugger and other stuff.

Every now and then a problem about linking is reported on Sun Studio forums. Sometimes the problem is that users try to invoke ld, the link-editor, directly, instead of using compiler driver (CC, cc, f90, f95, ...). I'd like to shed some light on the subject and illustrate the difference.[Read More]

In this post I'm going to try to collect most useful and commonly used ~/.dbxrc settings. I'll start with contents of my ~/.dbxrc file with probably most popular aliases in hope for comments and additions.

I encourage you to share functions, aliases, useful dbxenv settings that make your dbx a better debugger.

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All Sun Studio distributions [that I am aware of] contain a utility program named dwarfdump; as is apparent from its name, dwarfdump can print DWARF information contained in an ELF executable or shared object. There also exists third type of ELF files - relocatable files; those are object files (.o) produced by a compiler that can be linked together to produce another relocatable file (.o) or executable/shared library.

One would expect dwarfdump to handle all types of ELF files, but until recently, dwardump would often crash when dumping debug information of a relocatable file on x64 and sparcv9 binaries. In this post I'll explain the reasons for crash and why relocation records processing is important when reading DWARF.

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A new set of cheatsheets, now with rather frequently used utilities for ELF files examination. Includes nm, readelf, pvs and a bunch of other useful programs:

NOTE: .svg files are saved as "Inkscape SVG" and are intended to be edited in Inkscape, not to be viewed by common image viewer (which may display garbage instead of some elemets).

Refs:

• Linker and Libraries Guide - Solaris 10 edition of a classic volume.

I don't use mdb in my everyday work, however sometimes it is not only useful, but essential - when you have to debug at low level, which dbx tends to hide from you (for example, dbx usually can't display stack trace past main()). So here are a few commands that I find useful:

NOTE: .svg files are saved as "Inkscape SVG" and are intended to be edited in Inkscape, not to be viewed by common image viewer (which may display garbage instead of some elemets).

Refs:

• Modular Debugger (mdb) cheatsheet - more thorogh version that my drawings.
• Solaris Modular Debugger Guide - official document from docs.sun.com

I got tired of looking up what this or that SPARC instruction means and where to find %fp register value when you're in a leaf procedure, so I decided to prepare a few small cheatsheets that have this kind of information in very compact form.

I'm posting PDF and source svg here in hope that this info will be useful for other people as well. Anyone's welcomed to download/print/modify those.

NOTE: .svg files are saved as "Inkscape SVG" and are intended to be edited in Inkscape, not to be viewed by common image viewer (which may display garbage instead of some elemets).

Refs:

• SPARC Assembly Language - very useful, minimum to no "syntactic sugar", pure information.
• A Laboratory Manual for the SPARC - older, longer reading, but has more coding examples.
• Technical SPARC CPU Resources - lots of links to other pages. Explore the Web.
• SPARC Architecture Manual, Version 9 - ultimate source of information, comes in PDF form.

Страница с вопросами и ответами о Sun Studio  -- на русском языке и с актуальной информацией.

 Я перевел существующий FAQ о Sun Studio Криса Квенелли, а заодно и обновил содержащуюся там информацию (во время составления оригинального FAQ актуальной была версия 11, теперь же последняя версия Sun Studio - 12).