miércoles, 16 de noviembre de 2011

GDB for debugging NachOS

Hi there, on this post I'll explain how we used the GDB debugger to find some errors in our NachOS.

We used GDB to find which program was causing a Segmentation Fault, which we kept getting from trying to execute two NachOS machines in two different command lines, one with: ./nachos -m 0 -o 1 &  and the other with: ./nachos -m 1 -o 0 &, this was done to test the network.

First of all, what is GDB?

"GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.
GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
  • Start your program, specifying anything that might affect its behavior.
  • Make your program stop on specified conditions.
  • Examine what has happened, when your program has stopped.
  • Change things in your program, so you can experiment with correcting the effects of one bug and go on to learn about another.
The program being debugged can be written in Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal (and many other languages)."

You can check if you already have GDB using: which gdb, on the command line. If you don't you can install it with a simple: sudo apt-get install GDB.

Example run:

Now, the important part, using it. As the description says, GDB can debug C++ programs, so we decided to use it to see if it really works, and find what in NachOS was causing that Segmentation Fault.

Like said before, there were two different machines running at the moment in two command lines, one would get a Segmentation Fault, and other an Assertion Failed. The first one to run, would be getting a Segmentation Fault, and the second an Assertion Failed, always in that order.

Segmentation Fault:
And the Assertion Fault:

So, to find the culprit, we first run gdb, executing gdb in both command lines for the NachOS executable using:  gdb nachos.



And then we run in one  ./nachos -m 0 -o 1   and the other with: ./nachos -m 1 -o 0 . This was important because if we just executed one, the conditions in which the error occurred wouldn't be the same. 

This produced the following output:


So as we can see there, gdb is telling us:
 The program received a Segmentation Fault in Lock::IsHeldByCurrentThread at 
../threads/synch.cc: 117
117       return lockHolder = currentThread;

Its telling us which line, which method, and which file caused it. So we proceeded to fix that:
Changing line:      return lockHolder = currentThread;
To:                        return lockHolder;
(Yes, as simple as that)

After modifying that, we compiled NachOS again, and proceeded to try again to test the NachOS network again, and the output was:

The message worked in both machines, and no more Segmentation Faults were produced.

And now, maybe late, we realize the importance of debugging, because at the 1st Assignment we kept getting Segmentation Faults, without realizing which program was causing, so now onward we know how to tell.

So, that's all for this post, if you have any doubts or suggestions feel free to comment. :)

1 comentario: