Exercise 1: Initial information

As you become accustomed to working with system crash dumps and doing so becomes more routine to you, you'll probably find that you develop a habit of initially checking the same information in each crash you analyze.

Task:

Write your own macro to collect some initial information from a live system or a set of system crash dump files. Here are some things you might want your macro to display:

• System name

• Boot time

• Crash time

• Panic message

• Stack traceback

Hint:

If working with Solaris 2, try to use the utsname macro, but keep in mind:

• Where will adb look for the macros you want to use?

• How do you return from a macro?

An example of output to aim for:

The following output is from a Solaris 2 system. Note that in this example, we are using the -I option of adb to specify the name of the directory where our own macros reside.

 Hiya...  adb -k -I /mymacros unix.0 vmcore.0  physmem 1e05  $<initial-info  Initial Dump Information                  ========================  utsname:  utsname:        sys     SunOS  utsname+0x101:  node    pasta  utsname+0x202:  release 5.3  utsname+0x303:  version Generic_101318-45  utsname+0x404:  machine sun4m  srpc_domain:  srpc_domain:    sunservice.uk.sun.com        Domain name  time:  time:           1994 May 12 12:48:20         Time of crash                  1994 May 12 10:23:55         Time of boot  cpr_info+0x2200:                  Panic string: Data fault                  Stack traceback  complete_panic(0xf0049460,0xf05d03ac,0xf05d0238,0x3,0x0,0x1) + 10c  do_panic(?) + 1c  vcmn_err(0xf015f7a8,0xf05d03ac,0xf05d03ac,0x3cad8,0x2,0x3)  cmn_err(0x3,0xf015f7a8,0x0,0x18,0x18,0xf0152400) + 1c  die(0x9,0xf05d04c4,0x3,0x3a6,0x2,0xf015f7a8) + 78  trap(0x9,0xf05d04c4,0xf01822d8,0x3a6,0x2,0x0) + 598  fault(?) + 84  mutex_enter(0x0,0xd,0x64,0x1,0xd,0xf05d06ec)  lookuppn(0xf05d06e4,0x0,0xf05d06ec,0x0,0x0,0xfc01dd14) + 148  lookupname(0x0,0x0,0x1,0x0,0xf05d07f4,0x0) + 28  vn_open(0x3cad8,0x0,0x3,0xb40,0xf05d08ac,0x0) + a4  copen(0x3cad8,0x3,0xb48,0xf05d0920,0x3cad8,0xf0156628) + 70  syscall(0xf0160f3c) + 3e4  $q  Hiya...