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.

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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.

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

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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)