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About This Manual
This manual provides information on the tools used to debug a kernel and
analyze a crash dump file of the Tru64™ UNIX (formerly DIGITAL UNIX)
operating system. It also explains how to write extensions to the kernel
debugging tools. You can use extensions to display customized information
from kernel data structures or a crash dump file.
Audience
This manual is intended for system programmers who write programs that
use kernel data structures and are built into the kernel. It is also intended
for system administrators who are responsible for managing the operating
system. System programmers and administrators should have in-depth
knowledge of operating system concepts, commands, and utilities.
New and Changed Features
The following list describes changes that have been made to this manual
for Tru64 UNIX Version 5.0:
• The former Chapter 4, Managing Crash Dumps, has been deleted and
its contents have been moved to the System Administration manual.
All information on that subject is now in one manual. The System
Administration manual was chosen because many aspects of managing
crash dumps (such as storage considerations and default settings) are
handled by a system administrator, often during system installation.
• Crash dumps are now compressed by default and are stored in
compressed crash dump files. These are named
vmzcore.n to
differentiate them from the uncompressed vmcore.n files. Starting with
Version 5.0, all the Tru64 UNIX debugging tools can read vmzcore.n as
well as vmcore.n files. Examples throughout this manual have been
updated to show use of vmzcore.n files.
• When debugging a crash dump with dbx or kdbx, you can examine the
call stack of the user program whose execution precipitated the kernel
crash. For more information, see Section 2.1.9.
• If a loadable kernel module was moved to another location after a kernel
crash, you can specify the directory path where dbx should look for the
module. For more information, see Section 2.1.3.
About This Manual vii