Course Code: 918
Length: 2 days

This course presents the tools and concepts of crash dump analysis. This course features:

• Calling procedure standard and exception handling as a foundation for walking the stack during a crash.
• BUGCHECK mechanism and its effect on registers will be described.
• System Dump Analyzer (SDA) and the Crash Log Extractor Utility (CLUE), as they relate to crash dump analysis
• Requirements for a dump, how a dump is written and possible locations of the dump
• Methodology for attacking basic crashes, including the implications of process vs. system context, the virtual address space in which the PC of the crash resides, and the IPL of the CPU at the time of the crash. Initial mapping of the crash to the source listing associated with the culprit of the BUGCHECK.

Who Should Attend

OpenVMS System Programmers

Prerequisites

Before taking this course, students should be able to:

• Complete of OpenVMS Alpha Internals and Data Structures I and II.
• Read, and ideally write code, in VAX macro.
• Program in DEC C.
• Read, and ideally write code, in ALPHA macro.

Benefits of Attending this Class

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

• Describe what causes a crash to occur.
• Describe the stack produced by each type of procedure call.
• Describe the requirements for generating a crash dump.
• Describe the effect of context and virtual address space as it relates to a crash.
• Analyze a basic crash dump of the following types:
  • Access Violation (Process Context)
  • Access Violation (System Context)
  • Pagefault IPL High

Course Contents

• Review of Procedures and Exception Handling
• Crash Dump Analysis Fundamentals
• Analyzing Crashes
• Invalid Exception Crashes
• Unexpected System Service Exception Crashes
• Page Fault IPL High Crashes
• Sample Complete Crash Analysis