From: Will
Senn
How did folks debug assembly routines in Unix v6,
back in the day?
There are three different questions here, although you may not realize it:
- How did folks debug assembly routines in user programs in Unix v6
- How did folks debug assembly routines in the kernel in Unix v6
- How did folks debug assembly routines in PDP-11 standalone code created
with Unix v6
I did all three, and I used different methods for each.
For user code, there was no source-level debugger, so debugging C programs
and debugging code written in assembler were the same thing. I used 'adb'
(which is, stricly speaking, slightly post-V6 - our system at MIT was
actually sort of an early PWB clone), but V6 itself provides 'db' (and also,
IIRC, 'cdb'); all three are very similar.
For standalone code (in my case, a packet switch that ran on PDP-11's), I
used a version of DDT that was linked in with the rest of the code. The
original version was one in MACRO-11 which I inherited from Jim Mathis at
SRI, but I eventually re-wrote it in portable C, and it was used on the 68K,
uVax and 29K.
For kernel assembler code... I can't remember what I did! Although I wrote a
fair amount of it (I modified m45.s very extensively, to work with the Able
ENABLE card), so I must have done _something_, but I have no idea what. In
theory I could have linked DDT in with the kernel, but I don't think I ever
did so?
Recently I was debugging some kernel code (the splice() system call we were
discussing here), and I debugged it using... printf()'s! It was written in C,
but I don't really differentiate between debugging C code, and assembler.
2. No map file created by ld.
LD normally includes a symbol table in the output file, which 'nm' can dump.
3. No debugger that I can find.
See above.
My workarounds include using OD to view the
generated machine code
Use db/cdb/adb if you want to look at compiled code. Also, for 'cc', use the
-S flag.
Noel
I have cdb, it works. How do I exit it. %, CTRL-C, CTRL-D, CTRL-Z,
Break, CTRL-Break, and so on just result in a ? being displayed. I
checked the man page, no joy. It is possible to use %r to run the
program at which point it exits, but I'm hoping there's a magic key
combination...
db works too and it's exit is simply %.
Thanks,
Will