On Wed, 26 Dec 2007, Julian Elischer wrote:
Thanks! DDB capture output, scripting, and textdumps were pretty much what
I had in the queue for DDB at this point. I'll see if I can't come up with
some stuff, and look forward to hearing about how people use these ones.
I'll also happily accept bug reports...
Textdumps should open up the door for some interesting things in terms of
bug management--I'd love to see someone put together some rc.d/rc.conf
parts to do automated crash report submission (disabled by default, of
course) and a database to hold the results. I suspect a moderate number of
panic reports are lost on the basis that filing a proper bug report is
fairly difficult (get out kgdb, etc), or that the boxes quietly reboot and
the core dumps rot on disk (to be deleted when space runs out). Perhaps
hoovering up those textdumps, especially if we can correlate them with one
another using some automated processing, might be quite informative. Or
just a good time sink :-).
scripting is made almost infinitly more useful with some
registers/variables..
(especially if there is some simple looping.. allowing following of a linked
list or similar.)
For the purposes of textdumps, the current simple scripting pretty much met my
needs. One of the interesting advantages to DDB is its very
domain-specificity: because it's intended to debug only one program, the
kernel, it has a lot of commands that are quite aware of kernel semantics.
As a result, unlike with a traditional general-purpose debugger, you don't
need an extensive script language to report on data structures, the keeping of
invariants, etc, because there is a trivial facility to add new commands to
inspect data.
For the purposes of scripting debugging at breakpoints for something other
than basic reporting, and for teaching the scripting language how to manage
data structures, you'd need something significantly more complex. To do much
more with scripting than I've done would probably require a fairly major
restructuring of DDB.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
_______________________________________________
cvs-all@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-all
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
