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From: weiser.pa@Xerox.COM
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: debugging incremental loaded executables
Message-ID: <10081@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 30-Oct-87 16:37:10 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.10081
Posted: Fri Oct 30 16:37:10 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 00:54:53 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 19

If you are running on SunOS (except on sun-4's where this is documented
as broken) dbx can debug running processes.  Therefore, if your
incremental load builds a new map of the combined world, and you then
call dbx as follows:

dbx new-map-file pid

you can look at the incremental world just fine.  Of course, later
incremental loads must be against the new-map-file, not the original.
We are using this trick here, and it works well.

The reason you can't look at core dumps this way is that, for core
dumps, dbx apparently expects the new-map-file to be a real picture of
the entire memory, including the full text and data area.  ld -A doesn't
produce such a file (the text and data area are only the contents of the
most recently loaded thing, even though the symbol table refers to
anything ever loaded).

-mark