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From: mark@rtech.ARPA (Mark Wittenberg)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: How do *you* debug device drivers?
Message-ID: <108@rtech.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 19-Jan-85 11:23:09 EST
Article-I.D.: rtech.108
Posted: Sat Jan 19 11:23:09 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 21-Jan-85 07:53:51 EST
References: <541@vu44.UUCP>, <895@dual.UUCP> <4855@utzoo.UUCP> <105@redwood.UUCP> <114@redwood.UUCP>
Organization: Relational Technology, Berkeley CA
Lines: 20

Thanks rob; that was a useful set of suggestions.

When I was at Zehntel we had an additional solution to the problem of crashes
while testing kernel software (we had plenty of "single-user" time).
We were running SUN 68000 boards, and since we had to rewrite the boot proms
anyway we put a small kernel debugger into the proms.  Then when the system
crashed we didn't have to reboot: we just activated the prom debugger and could
then look at a kernel stack trace, the proc table, random memory ... very
useful.

BTW, one of the nasty problems we had wouldn't have been very well addressed
by rob's techniques; the hardware in question worked ok EXCEPT for interrupts.
Another one worked only when run from a standalone kernel (because it fit in
64k!).

Mark Wittenberg
Relational Technology, Inc.

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