Tracing at the Machine-Instruction Level

Tracing techniques at the machine-instruction level work the same as at the source code level, except you use the tracei command. For the tracei command, dbx executes a single instruction only after each check of the address being executed or the value of the variable being traced. The tracei command produces automatic stepi-like behavior: the program advances one instruction at a time, stepping into function calls.

When you use the tracei command, it causes the program to stop for a moment after each instruction while dbx checks for the address execution or the value of the variable or expression being traced. Using the tracei command can slow execution considerably.

For more information on trace and its event specifications and modifiers, see Tracing Execution and tracei Command.

Here is the general syntax for the tracei command:

tracei event-specification [modifier]

Commonly used forms of the tracei command are:

For more information, see tracei Command.

For SPARC:

(dbx) tracei next -in main
(dbx) cont
0x00010814: main+0x0004:  clr     %l0
0x00010818: main+0x0008:  st      %l0, [%fp - 0x8]
0x0001081c: main+0x000c:  call    foo
0x00010820: main+0x0010:  nop
0x00010824: main+0x0014:  clr     %l0
....
....
(dbx) (dbx) tracei step -in foo -if glob == 0
(dbx) cont
0x000107dc: foo+0x0004:  mov     0x2, %l1
0x000107e0: foo+0x0008:  sethi   %hi(0x20800), %l0
0x000107e4: foo+0x000c:  or      %l0, 0x1f4, %l0     ! glob
0x000107e8: foo+0x0010:  st      %l1, [%l0]
0x000107ec: foo+0x0014:  ba      foo+0x1c
....
....