Technical data

Contents
Preface ............................................................ vii
SDA Description .................................................... SDA–1
1 System Management and SDA. . ................................ SDA–4
1.1 Understanding the System Dump File . . ....................... SDA–4
1.1.1 Choosing Between SYSDUMP.DMP and PAGEFILE.SYS Files . . . SDA–4
1.1.2 Choosing a Dump File Style.............................. SDA–6
1.2 Saving System Dumps ..................................... SDA–6
1.3 Invoking SDA in the Site-Specific Startup Command Procedure ..... SDA–7
2 Analyzing a System Dump ..................................... SDA–8
2.1 Invoking SDA............................................ SDA–9
2.2 Mapping the Contents of the Dump File ....................... SDA–9
2.3 Building the SDA Symbol Table .............................. SDA–10
2.4 Executing the SDA Initialization File (SDA$INIT) ............... SDA–10
3 Analyzing a Running System . . . ................................ SDA–11
4 SDA Context ............................................... SDA–12
5 CPU Context ............................................... SDA–12
6 Process Context ............................................. SDA–13
7 SDA Command Format ....................................... SDA–15
7.1 General Command Format. . ................................ SDA–15
7.2 Expressions ............................................. SDA–15
7.2.1 Radix Operators ....................................... SDA–16
7.2.2 Arithmetic and Logical Operators . . ....................... SDA–16
7.2.3 Precedence Operators. . . ................................ SDA–17
7.2.4 Symbols ............................................. SDA–17
8 Investigating System Failures . . ................................ SDA–19
8.1 General Procedure for Analyzing System Failures . ............... SDA–19
8.2 Fatal Bugcheck Conditions . ................................ SDA–20
8.2.1 Fatal Exceptions ...................................... SDA–20
8.2.2 Illegal Page Faults ..................................... SDA–23
9 A Sample System Failure ..................................... SDA–24
9.1 Identifying the Bugcheck . . . ................................ SDA–25
9.2 Identifying the Exception . . . ................................ SDA–25
9.3 Locating the Source of the Exception.......................... SDA–26
9.3.1 Finding the Driver by Using the Program Counter ............ SDA–26
9.3.2 Calculating the Offset into the Driver’s Program Section ....... SDA–27
9.4 Finding the Problem Within the Routine ....................... SDA–28
9.4.1 Examining the Routine . ................................ SDA–28
9.4.2 Checking the Values of Key Variables ...................... SDA–29
9.4.3 Identifying and Correcting the Defective Code . ............... SDA–30
10 Inducing a System Failure ..................................... SDA–31
10.1 Meeting Crash Dump Requirements . . . ....................... SDA–31
10.2 Examples of How to Cause System Failures .................... SDA–32
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