Summary

As you have discovered in this chapter, adb is a powerful debugging tool that you'll be able to put to good use when trying to figure out why your system gave up the ghost. From our own experiences, we find that we often use adb :

• For dumping the stack out with $c or one of the stack traceback macros.

• To display the contents of the core file.

• For debugging, often just poking around, looking for things that "aren't right," following pointers, dumping out structures, and just examining the state of the data in general.

• For running various macro files, since most of them are used to display complex structures from the memory contents.

As you become more and more accustomed to adb , you'll find that your skills with kadb also improve since adb and kadb are so closely related .

Now that you have a good idea of what adb can do for you, let's move on and start putting it to use!