kgdb on sparc64

[Ruben de Groot]

On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 11:11:11PM +0100, Marius Strobl typed:

> > After upgrading to 7.1-PRERELEASE last month I'm seeing some 
> > spontaneous reboots with crash dumps on this Netra X1. How
> > can I debug this as kgdb seems not to be working?

[...]

> I've never had much luck with kgdb(1) on any arch and use
> devel/gdb53 which still has '-k' instead (for sparc64 just
> remove the BROKEN from the port Makefile; the problem
> leading to that one being added was fixed some time a go).

The installation of gbd53 fails unfortunately with:

gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/devel/gdb53/work/gdb-5.3/sparc64-portbld-freebsd7.1/libiberty'
gmake[1]: Entering directory `/usr/ports/devel/gdb53/work/gdb-5.3/libiberty'
rm -f libiberty.a pic/libiberty.a
sparc64-unknown-freebsd7.1-ar rc libiberty.a \
          regex.o cplus-dem.o cp-demangle.o md5.o alloca.o argv.o choose-temp.o concat.o dyn-string.o fdmatch.o fibheap.o floatformat.o fnmatch.o getopt.o getopt1.o getpwd.o getruntime.o hashtab.o hex.o lbasename.o make-temp-file.o objalloc.o obstack.o partition.o pexecute.o safe-ctype.o sort.o spaces.o splay-tree.o strerror.o strsignal.o ternary.o xatexit.o xexit.o xmalloc.o xmemdup.o xstrdup.o xstrerror.o  
gmake[1]: sparc64-unknown-freebsd7.1-ar: Command not found
gmake[1]: *** [libiberty.a] Error 127
gmake[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/ports/devel/gdb53/work/gdb-5.3/libiberty'
gmake: *** [all-libiberty] Error 2
*** Error code 2

Stop in /usr/ports/devel/gdb53.

> For your purposes it's probably simpler to just build a
> kernel with debugger by adding "options DDB", "options KDB"
> and "makeoptions DEBUG=-g". Then when the kernel panics
> just enter "backtrace" on the console. With a X1 you
> most likely use serial console anyway so you can easily
> capture the output.

I'll build a kernel with those options just in case. But
would rather not use it on this particular machine, as it is 
a production server and should not be down for extended periods
of time.
Meanwhile, moving over websites to another machine (another X1,
but running -current) that seems to be more stable ATM.

thanks,
Ruben