tag
8 posts
FreeBSD panicked and rebooted. Here's how to get the crash dump kgdb actually needs, and how to read it well enough to find the responsible driver or subsystem.
Getting DTrace enabled and running real diagnostic scripts on FreeBSD, from syscall counting to finding exactly which function is burning CPU, without recompiling anything.
An application crashes on Haiku and a debug report window appears. Rather than dismissing it, here's how to actually read what it's telling you and use it to fix — or usefully report — the crash.
The difference between an oops and a full panic, how to read the call trace in an oops message well enough to identify the responsible driver, and when an oops is safe to ignore versus a sign of real trouble ahead.
Why a zombie process is actually harmless dead weight rather than a resource leak, and how to find the parent process that's actually responsible for clearing it.
A complete walkthrough of the two genuinely essential shell scripting debugging tools — one that traces exactly what a script actually executes, and one that catches whole categories of bugs before the script ever runs.
A moth taped into a 1947 logbook is one of computing's most-repeated stories — and one of its most-garbled. Here's what the primary source, the logbook itself, actually shows.
A complete walkthrough using strace to see exactly which system calls a misbehaving program is making — often the fastest way to diagnose a problem with no useful log output at all.