debugger hangs

[Eric Hanchrow]

Here's a bizarre problem I noticed.

I've been developing and testing a program on our Sun-4, running SunOS
4.0.3.  As I've been going along, I've been running it under a debugger
now and again, as problems show up.  But the last time I made a fix to the
code, recompiled, and started up the debugger, the debugger hung.  "What
debugger were you using?" you ask.  I was using the Gnu debugger, release
3.2.  I was compiling with the Gnu compiler, gcc version 1.35.  Here's a
transcript:

Current directory is /home/eric/work/drivers/fx100/new/sun4/
GDB 3.2, Copyright (C) 1988 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for GDB; type "info warranty" for details.
GDB is free software and you are welcome to distribute copies of it
 under certain conditions; type "info copying" to see the conditions.
Reading symbol data from /home/eric/work/drivers/fx100/new/sun4/fx100...done.
Type "help" for a list of commands.
(gdb) br main
Reading in symbols for awk.c...done.
Reading in symbols for bitmap.c...done.
Reading in symbols for main.c...done.
Breakpoint 1 at 0x6b84: file main.c, line 46.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /home/eric/work/drivers/fx100/new/sun4/fx100 

And that's the last I hear from it.  (I waited about ten minutes.)  I
don't think it was spending its time reading in a core file, because there
wasn't a core file in that directory.  And not only did the debugger
process seem to hang, but I couldn't kill it with control-C.  Or
control-Z, either.  And for that matter, `kill -9' didn't do it either.
(As I write this, I have about a dozen of these never-say-die debug
processes hanging around.  They don't seem to use up any CPU cycles, and I
don't want to reboot the machine unless I have to.)

Now the interesting parts -- the problem does not occur on our RoadRunner
(SunOS 4.0.1), or our Sun-3 (SunOS 3.5).  And yet it *does* occur with
dbx.  I've tried all the combinations of
platform/compiler/debugger/binding-option which make sense (e.g., gdb does
not run on the 386i); in all cases, the attempts on the Sun-4 hung, and
the attempts on the other platforms worked just fine.  Does this sound
familiar to anybody??

-----------------------

Date:    27 Nov 89 20:36:43 GMT
From:    "Joe Habermann" <haberman at cs.umn.edu>
Subject: wanted: interface builder for SunView

Does anyone know of an interface builder for SunView?  What were looking
for doesn't have to be Public Domain, but it must be well done.  Yes, I
know that Sun is saying that SunView is becoming XView.  Ok, then, an
XView interface builder.

I'd especially like to hear from people have actually purchased such
software and hear what they have to say about it, but I welcome replies
from vendors as well.

Sincere Thanks in Advance,
Joe Habermann / haberman at umn-cs.cs.umn.edu / ..!rutgers!umn-cs!haberman