Debuggers

Digital UNIX Version 4.0 supports the following two source code debuggers:

• dbx

• ladebug

The dbx Debugger

The dbx debugger supports debugging programs written in C, FORTRAN, Assembler, Cobol, and Pascal. It supports debugging active kernels, either locally or remotely; analyzing kernel crash dumps; debugging program core dumps; shared libraries; and, through /proc, attachment to running processes and programs using multiple threads. It can also patch the on-disk copy of either user programs or the kernel. The dbx debugger also supports multiprocess debugging and allows debugging through fork and exec calls.

The ladebug Debugger

The ladebug debugger is a source level, object-oriented symbolic debugger that has both a graphical user interface (GUI) and a command-line interface similar to the dbx command-line interface, Note that the GUI is also integrated with FUSE and can be accessed from the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).

The ladebug debugger supports the following functionality:

• Attaching to and detaching from running processes.

• Loading programs to the debugger.

• Detecting and debugging across fork and exec.

• Debugging multiple processes

• Debugging multithreaded programs; either DECthreads applications or kernel modules that make use of kernel threads.

• Debugging programs written in C++, C, Fortran 77, Fortran 90, Ada, Cobol, and Assembler

  Note that ladebug is a full C++ debugger which demangles C++ names, understands C++ expressions, provides support for inline functions, templates, and C++ exceptions.

  Also note that the support for F77/F90 includes case insensitivity, common blocks, alternate entry points, language-dependent type printing, and assume shape arrays.

• Debugging machine level code

• Debugging running programs or core dumps

• Debugging Shared Objects

• Catching unaligned access problems

• Debugging active kernels, either locally or remotely, and analyzing kernel crash dumps

• Evaluating expressions using the syntax of the source programming language

• Remote debugging of programs running on different target machines (such as EB64, EB64+, and EB66 evaluation boards from Digital's Semiconductor Engineering Group) by way of the remote debugging server.

  Note that the ladebug remote debugging protocol is also available along with the C source code for a sample remote debugging server that adheres to the protocol.

• Internationalization

  Note that internationalization support is available in a separate kit. The internationalized ladebug debugger accepts multibyte characters as input, and outputs local language characters according to the current global locale set in the debugger. It also supports the wchar_t datatype in C/C++.