HP WDB 5.8 Release Notes

Announcement

HP Wildebeest Debugger (WDB) 5.8 is an HP-supported implementation of the open source

debugger GDB. It supports source-level debugging of programs written in HP C, HP aC++, and

Fortran 90 on Itanium®-based systems running HP-UX 11i v2 or HP-UX 11i v3, and HP 9000

systems running HP-UX 11i v1, HP-UX 11i v2, or HP-UX 11i v3.

This document discusses the most recent product information for HP WDB 5.8

For the latest version of HP WDB, see the HP WDB Technical Resources website at:

http://www.hp.com/go/wdb

What Is New in This Version

This section describes the new features that are introduced in this version of HP WDB.

• “Supports Batch mode of thread debugging”

• “Detects various kinds of memory corruptions”

• “Displays run time type information” (page 8)

Supports Batch mode of thread debugging

HP-WDB supports batch mode of debugging threads for HP-UX 11iv2 and later, on Integrity

systems and on HP-UX 11i v3 in PA-RISC systems for 64 bit applications. The debugger provides

a log file with the list of thread-related errors that occur in the application.

HP WDB 5.8 detects the following thread-related conditions in batch mode:

1. The thread attempts to acquire a non-recursive mutex that it currently holds.

2. The thread attempts to unlock a mutex or a read-write lock that it has not acquired.

3. The thread waits (blocked) on a mutex or read-write lock that is held by a thread with a

different scheduling policy.

4. Different threads non-concurrently wait on the same condition variable, but with different

associated mutexes.

5. The threads terminate execution without unlocking the associated mutexes or read-write

locks.

6. The thread waits on a condition variable for which the associated mutex is not locked.

7. The thread terminates execution and the resources associated with the terminated thread

continue to exist in the application because the thread has not been joined or detached.

8. The thread uses more than the specified percentage of the stack allocated to the thread.

9. The number of threads waiting on any pthread object exceeds the specified threshold number.

The debugger reports information specific to the pthread objects and the stack frame of the

executing thread at the point of error.

Detects various kinds of memory corruptions

HP WDB 5.8 enables you to detect various kinds of memory corruption at runtime without the

need to have access to the application source codes.

The various features introduced are as follows:

• Detect dangling pointers and dangling blocks

• Detect in-block corruption of freed blocks

• Specify the amount of guard bytes for every block of allocated memory

The following is the update to the existing command:

Announcement 7