On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:46:19 -0700 (PDT)
Tom Chen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am searching a good debugger to debug my network driver. Which do you guys
> use?
>
> kmdb looks better than DTrace, in that it enables breakpoint, step in, step
> over. However, on my x86, nv61, the [b]mdb -K[/b] command does not invoke it.
You are comparing apples and oranges here. If you don't know either
tool and I didn't know much about you then I'd suggest learning mdb
first. But close on its heals pick up dtrace because the two work
together nicely. Dtrace can often make it very easy to either narrow
down or identify the code you are interested in. Once that happens you
can use mdb to do more extensive analysis. In the cash of crashdumps
it often runs the other way around esp. if the problem is
reproduceable. You use mdb to figure out a lot about the problem and
devise a plan of attack in which you use dtrace to further isolate the
problem.
I think _Solaris Performance and Tools: DTRACE and MDB techniques for
Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris_ by McDougall, Mauro, and Gregg (ISBN
0-13-156819-1) would be a good book for you to pick up. Its a fairly
highlevel flythrough of a bunch of analysis and tools topics, but it
gets your feet wet enough to swim deeper. My least favorite chapter is
the one on Networks (7) although I suspect that is because the amount I
could learn was the least. It seemed less dense then some of the other
chapters to me. Dtrace (1 chapter and bits spread through out the
book) and MDB (3 chapters) are both covered. I think the dtrace
coverage is a little light although the documentation provided on
docs.sun.com is wonderful so if augmented with you should have
everything you need to use dtrace to its fullest (and of course the
source is openly avalable on opensolaris.org and there is a dtrace
community which provides further help). The MDB coverage is very
nice. It can also be augmented with documentation from docs.sun.com to
get further information about the tool.
In any case, however you choose to learn, you are going to have to
_use_ the tool. The two tools seem like the perfect instruments to
tackle Knuth's challenge in (I think; 100ish page purple softback)
_Selected Essays_ to study a second of time on your computer and
determine everything that happened.
mph
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