[OpenIndiana-New-developers] Building XNV_155 question

[Frank Middleton]

Answering some of my own questions:

On 04/03/11 14:46, Frank Middleton wrote:

> Do I have to use dbx or is there a way to use gdb?

There's  a map of gdb to dbx commands in the FAQ so it's not too bad...
Neither dbx nor gdb can find any debug info as is.

> I'm assuming that the executables from the build are debuggable?

Evidently not:

dbx) stop in main
dbx: warning: 'main' has no debugger info -- will trigger on first instruction

There is no obvious place to tell the build system to make the executables
debuggable, but it must be possible...
$ grep -i debug   open-src/common/Makefile*
open-src/common/Makefile.inc:DEBUG_BUILD_FLAGS = BUILD_DEBUG=yes
.....
Alas, adding "DEBUG_BUILD_FLAGS = BUILD_DEBUG=yes" to the top
level makefile seemsto make no difference.

Hmm. Maybe there's something else amiss. Am I the only "new developer"?
BTW I have more years of experience with C, Fortran, and Cobol as an
application architect/designer/coder than I really want to admit to. I've
even written a custom OS that was in production for years. But I've always
used tools that create makefiles so debugging them is an adventure...

It seems that the xnv source is about 6 million lines of C - about twice
the size of the biggest system I ever programmed. Shouldn't be too hard
to debug :-). How to get started? Should I be looking at dtrace first?  truss,
pstack etc., don't show anything particularly useful. Of course this might
not be a bug in Xorg but it sure looks like one...

> Tips from the gurus would be much appreciated.

Thanks -- Frank