Hi, In the process of documenting the 'btraceback' scripts in the form of a manpage so as to comply with the Debian guidelines, I'm wondering how safe it is in practice to attach a debugger like gdb or dbx to a running process to get a stacktrace.
Searching lists archives for 'btraceback' and reading the Problem Resolution Guide can give one the feeling that it is a perfectly safe thing to do, perhaps repeatedly, during normal operations. However, common search engines turned up hits that seemed to show that some (admitedly faulty) - programs may be striken with sudden death when such attempts are made by a debugger to attach to them. (Excluding of course binaries packed/protected to prevent debugging analysis by design). Have there been incidents known to have been caused by the use of btraceback/gdb/dbx during normal operations ? It is well understood that this risk applies to any program, and can involve the quality of the debugging software as much as the quality of the compilation; are there neverless specific things in the Bacula code or its build system that would have a known specific effect as a risk factor for live debugging ? Regards, -- Lucas B. Cohen "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edgar W. Dijkstra ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
