Knowledgebase Article 48


ASC/Linux: how to make a backtrace of an ASC crash

To help isolating bugs that cause crashes, backtraces can be very useful. To make a backtrace, run

gdb asc
run 

and make ASC crash. Then type

backtrace

and send the output to bugs@asc-hq.org. If you want to run ASC with command line parameters, pass the parameters to the run command.

In order to obtain a useful backtrace, you must have compiled ASC yourself with debugging symbols enabled. If debugging symbols were disabled, gdb will tell you something like no debugging symbols found or similar.

To enable debug symbols, type

EXPORT CXXFLAGS="-g"
EXPORT CFLAGS="-g"
and rebuild ASC with
make clean
configure
make
and, if desired, make install

valgrind

If your computer is powerful enough ( >= 1 GB memory, > 1000 MHz), running valgrind is very helpful:

valgrind asc

Valgrind lets the application run in a kind of virtual machine and analyzes its memory. The whole task requires tons of memory and slows ASC down by an order of magnitude, but the results are invaluable when the error is related to memory corruption.

Last change: Wed, 2007-08-01 14:59


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