Who Should Use This Book

If you were a detective and were investigating at the scene of a crime, you might interview the witnesses and ask them to describe what happened and who they saw. However, if there were no witnesses or these descriptions proved insufficient, you might consider collecting fingerprints and forensic evidence that could be examined for DNA to help solve the case. Often, software program failures divide into analogous categories: problems that can be solved with source-level debugging tools, and problems that require low-level debugging facilities, examination of core files, and knowledge of assembly language to diagnose and correct. MDB is a debugger designed to facilitate analysis of this second class of problems.

It might not be necessary to use MDB in every case, just as a detective doesn't need a microscope and DNA evidence to solve every crime. However, when programming a complex low-level software system such as an operating system, these situations can occur frequently. As a result, MDB is designed as a debugging framework that allows you to construct your own custom analysis tools to aid in the diagnosis of these problems. MDB also provides a powerful set of built-in commands that allow you to analyze the state of your program at the assembly language level.

If you are not familiar with assembly language programming and debugging, Related Books and Papers provides references to materials that you might find useful.

You should also disassemble various functions of interest in the programs you will be debugging in order to familiarize yourself with the relationship between your program's source code and the corresponding assembly language code. If you are planning to use MDB for debugging Solaris kernel software, you should read carefully Chapter 7, Kernel Debugging Modules and Chapter 8, Debugging With the Kernel Memory Allocator. These chapters provide more detailed information on the MDB commands and facilities provided for debugging Solaris kernel software.