HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 5 Miscellaneous Topics (vol 9)

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Aries(5)

Itanium(R)-based Systems Only

Aries(5)

4. Run gdb as:

$ gdb PA-RISC_binary

5. Note: Make sure that user has write permission on

/tmp directory and that there is space to create a

temporary ﬁle of one page size as obtained by

sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE)

system call.

The rest of the debugging process is the same as that followed on the PA-RISC HP-UX platform. All com-

mands of the

gdb debugger are supported subject to limitations listed under Limitations of PA-RISC GDB

Support.

Attaching PA-RISC GDB to PA-RISC process under Aries

An already running PA-RISC process can be debugged on Itanium-based systems by attaching PA-RISC

debugger gdb. After attaching PA-RISC gdb to a PA-RISC process under Aries all debugging operations

remain same as that on a native PA-RISC system.

Attach

gdb to already running PA-RISC process under Aries using the following steps :

1. Perform the preparatory steps as described above for debugging PA-RISC application under Aries using

PA-RISC gdb.

2. $ gdb PA-RISC_binary PA-RISC_processID

After debugging is ﬁnished, perform the following steps.

1. Unset the environment variable PA_DEBUG.

2. Restore the original value of the SHELL environment variable.

Limitations of PA-RISC GDB Support

The following are current limitations of PA-RISC

gdb support.

1. No support for debuggers other than PA-RISC HP-UX

gdb for debugging an emulated PA-RISC appli-

cation on an Itanium-based systems.

2. No support for old

gdb versions (of HP-UX 10.20 and earlier). However, debugging HP-UX 10.20

applications using a HP-UX 11.0 (and newer) PA-RISC gdb is supported.

3. PA-RISC

gdb behaves differently for child processes created using

fork() and vfork() system

calls. Since in Aries

vfork() calls made by PA-RISC application are replaced by

fork() calls, the

exact behavior shown by PA-RISC

gdb on a PA-RISC HP-UX platform is not shown by the PA-RISC

gdb running under Aries on Itanium-based HP-UX platform in this case.

4. If the debugged process is blocking in a system call, any attempt to get to the

gdb command prompt by

pressing

ˆC does not work. The process has to be killed from outside.

5. Aries does not provide true emulation of MxN threads and thus does not support debugging of PA-RISC

applications that are linked with MxN pthreads library.

Note that the PA-RISC applications linked with MxN pthreads library are emulated by Aries as tradi-

tional 1x1 threads and thus can only be debugged under Aries as any other non-MxN multithreaded

application. See the section Emulating MxN Threads for more information.

Generation of PA-RISC HP-UX Compatible Core File

Aries supports creation of PA-RISC core ﬁles on Itanium-based system, when the emulated PA-RISC appli-

cation dumps core.

The size of the core ﬁle is limited by ulimit() and/or setrlimit() values. See ulimit(2) and

setrlimit(2).

The PA-RISC application core ﬁle generated by Aries will have the name as core.PA-

RISC_application_name.

The PA-RISC HP-UX debugger is required to analyze core ﬁles generated by Aries for PA-RISC applica-

tions. For instance, the PA-RISC application core ﬁle generated by Aries can be debugged using

/usr/ccs/bin/gdbpa on Itanium-based system. Alternately, the application’s core ﬁle can be taken to

a PA-RISC machine and debugged using a PA-RISC debugger, though it is a very tedious process and likely

to be error-prone. See section Debugging Aries-Generated PA-RISC Core File on a Different Machine for

more information.

After Aries has successfully written core ﬁle for PA-RISC application, it will print the following message on

stderr:

HP-UX 11i Version 3: February 2007 − 2 − Hewlett-Packard Company 65