I have had a very hard time trying to debug which has hindered my work on some projects. In particular I have had trouble properly grasping how to work with debugging multi threaded applications, memory errors, and stack corruption. I know that it is not a five minute learning process to absorb such knowledge, but I have not yet found helpful references. I have had best luck trying to logically guess a location close to the problem, then setting a break and walking through the code. Once I hit a segfault, I run through the code with a breakpoint bringing me to just before the problem, but do not always understand how to go further. Strange things I see look like bad pointer addresses or the problems being caused within another thread. Since moving to FreeBSD7, I have been unable to use valgrind (which did not seem to help much on multi threaded apps) and I have not found a way to test binaries in the work directories and have had to install it to test it. At present, either gdb alone or kdbg seem to be the only ways I have been able to get even partially reliable responses from gdb because other interfaces disregard breakpoints and interrupts to execution. Are such difficulties common? On another similar topic, is there a good place to start learning about limitations to system internals, such as kern.ipc.shmmax and why I may 'not' want to set it to excessively high values or how other values relate to changing it? How can I tell what cap is occurring, whether it be a system limit or something controlled within the app such as with pthread_attr_setstacksize() and how are 'proper' values determined? The books "advanced programming in the unix environment" and "programming with posix threads" help me learn the unix world a bit better, but without debugging knowledge I find it hard to get anywhere with writing more than my high school level of programs and very difficult to get anywhere on the projects of others once threads and/or dynamic memory is involved. Any suggested course for further study from here? Thanks again, Edward Sutton, III
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