How to dump

[Gary Wardell]

Hi,

I have an app that is hanging the whole system. No keyboard, no mouse, no
screen update, no disk activity. Requires a front panel reset to reboot.

How can one cause a Dr Watson dump when the system reboots so I can examine
the stack dumps of all of the active processes?

I've tried the options in "Startup And Recovery" but they don't seem to
work, (or I'm missing something).

I'm at a loss as to how to proceed, short of inserting a bunch log logging
statements, but that seems like it must be the hard way as this is a rather
big multi threaded app.

Gary

 

[Gary Chanson]

Hi,

I have an app that is hanging the whole system. No keyboard, no mouse, no
screen update, no disk activity. Requires a front panel reset to reboot.

How can one cause a Dr Watson dump when the system reboots so I can examine
the stack dumps of all of the active processes?

I've tried the options in "Startup And Recovery" but they don't seem to
work, (or I'm missing something).

They will only work when the system blue screens.

I'm at a loss as to how to proceed, short of inserting a bunch log logging
statements, but that seems like it must be the hard way as this is a rather
big multi threaded app.

Usually, the answer is to run a kernel debugger and force the system to
blue screen. If the machine it truly hung to the point where even
Ctrl-Alt-Del isn't recognized, that might not be possible.

 

[Gary Wardell]

Usually, the answer is to run a kernel debugger and force the system to
blue screen. If the machine it truly hung to the point where even
Ctrl-Alt-Del isn't recognized, that might not be possible.

Yes, it is hung and ctl-alt-del has no effect.

My thought was that something might be able to take a dump when rebooting
after the event. It there any third party tool that is able to do this?

Gary

 

[Gary Chanson]

Yes, it is hung and ctl-alt-del has no effect.

My thought was that something might be able to take a dump when rebooting
after the event. It there any third party tool that is able to do this?

Not to my knowledge. By then, the information is most likely long gone.

 

[Ben Voigt [C++ MVP]]

They will only work when the system blue screens.


Usually, the answer is to run a kernel debugger and force the system to
blue screen. If the machine it truly hung to the point where even
Ctrl-Alt-Del isn't recognized, that might not be possible.

SysRq to break into kernel debugger should be recognized by the keyboard
interrupt handler, and work even when CAD does not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SysRq

 

[Gary Wardell]

Interesting, I knew some of that already. I didn't know about the debugging
aspect.

Where do I find information on how to setup this kernel debugger?

Gary