Advanced Crash Dump Analysis

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code.

ST-475

length.

5 days

type.

Instructor-Led

partner.

Sun Microsystems

price.

$3,500 :: $2,975 GSA GOV.

The Advanced Crash Dump Analysis and SPARC Architecture course provides students with essential skill to accomplish more detailed crash dump analysis than getting a stack trace and matching it to bugs. What re the common unique panic string panics, and what information needs to be looked at to determine the cause? What causes a bad trap to occur? Is there corrupt data or is there a hardware problem? This course alos presents information on analyzing user-forced crashes and live crash dumps. The latter part of the course includes information about the SPARC architecture and assembly language and explains how this information can be used to gather additional information from crash dumps.

There are currently no scheduled dates for this course. If you are interested in this course, request a course date with the links below.

who can benefit

Students who can benefit from this course are students who have some crash dump analysis experience and need more detailed information. These studentsare support personnel at self-supporting Sun installations and third-party driver and kernel module developers.

prerequisites

To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to:

	Analyze basic crash dumps with matching bugs
	Understand the basic organization of the kernel
	Describe the main data structures for each kernel subsystem
	Read and understand C code, including structure definitions, typedefs, and function prototypes
	Be familiar with assembly language programming
	Have a SunSolve account to access contract collections

skills gained

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

	Obtain and identify crash dumps
	Describe the Sparc architecture features necessary for analyzing crash dumps
	Analyze bad trap panics well enough to identify the corrupt data
	Analyze common unique panic string panics
	Analyze user-forced crash dumps
	Analyze live crash dumps
	Describe the SPARC assembly language instructions
	Describe SPARC architecture argument passing and stack contents
	Describe SPARC trap and interrupt handling
	MAtch an assembly language location in a crash dump to a line of kernel code

related courses, exams and materials

	before related training and products

ST-375 Introduction to Crash Dump Analysis and the SunOS Kernel

	after related training and products

SP-365 Solaris 9 Operating Environment Internals

course content details

	Module 1 - Obtaining and Identifying Crash Dumps

	Estimate the size of a crash dump
	Describe how to get information from a hard hang system
	Identify the types of crashes
	Describe how to work with partial or corrupt crash dump information

	Module 2 - SPARC Architecture

	Describe the SPARC architecture implementations
	Describe instruction pipelining
	Describe SPARC architecture data types
	Describe the organization of data in memory
	Describe SPARC architecture registers and their usage
	Describe the use of register windows
	Explain major components of SPARC architecture instructions

	Module 3 - Analyzing Bad Trap Panics

	Describe how traps occur and what events they handle
	Describe how bad trap panics occur
	Describe useful information in bad trap messages
	Describe how to relate stack data to function protoypes
	Find the data that caused the trap
	Describe how to determine if a crash is related to a hardware problem

	Module 4 - Analyzing Unique Panic String Panics

	Describe common types of unique panic string panics
	Describe how to get information about kernel memory corruption
	Analyze kernel heap corruption panics
	Analyze unique panic string panics caused by locks
	Analyze file system corruption panics

	Module 5 - Analyzing User-Forced Crash Dumps

	Describe how to detect a hung system
	Describe common causes of system hangs
	Recognize normal stacks
	Diagnose hang problems created by memory shortages
	Diagnose hang problems created by locks
	Diagnose hang problems created by hardware
	Diagnose hang problems related to the clock
	Describe procedures for analyzing difficult hangs

	Module 6 - Analyzing Live Crash Dumps

	Run debugging tools on a live system
	Describe the risks of modifying information on a live system
	Create a live crash dump
	Describe what information is not likely to be valid in a live crash dump file
	Diagnose an unkillable process
	Diagnose a memory leak

	Module 7 - SPARC Assembly Language

	Describe assembly language conventions
	Describe SPARC architecture instruction types
	Identify arithmetic and logical instructions
	Describe the use of the sethi instruction
	Identify load and store instructions
	Describe the instructions that are used for locks
	Describe alternate address spaces
	Describe floating point instructions
	Describe transfers of control
	Identify synthetic instructions

	Module 8 - SPARC Architecture Stacks and Arguments

	Describe simple argument passing
	Describe stack formats
	Describe complex argument passing
	Verify argument validity
	Describe how local variables are accessed
	Describe the characteristics of leaf functions
	Describe what a tail call is and how it effects the stack

	Module 9 - SPARC Architecture Traps and Interrupts

	Describe the purposes of traps
	Describe how the UltraSPARC(R) processor handles traps
	Describe trap levels
	Describe watchdog resets and RED state exceptions
	Analyze RED state output
	Analyze XIR data
	Describe how interrupts are processed
	Analyze crashes at trap levels greater than zero

	Module 10 - Matching Assembly Language to C Code

	Describe the differences between optimized and unoptimized code
	Describe how variables are accessed
	Describe the assembly instruction that indicates a function call
	Find the line of C code that corresponds to or includes that assembly instruction (given a system dump and an instruction in a function)