Risc6000 dbx

[Anand Bemra]

Although I go through comp.unix.aix about 3-4 times a week, I have
not come across folks complaining about the dbx on Risc6000. 

When I get a core dump, I expect the dbx to tell me which function it
core dumped in by giving me the stack dump. It should not matter whether or not
I had the debug option set when I compiled my source code. 
The debug option is needed only if I wanted to see where *inside* the function 
the core dump occured.

Another irritating fact of life with Risc6000 is that when I do a 
'file core' command, it tells me 

"core:		data" 
instead of telling me which executable dumped that core.

The problem gets worse when you are debugging C++ code. I am using the
Oasys 1.2E C++ translator. The stack dump is quite often useless, 
probably because the dbx cannot figure out the corresponding C function 
names. I have been unable to cast pointers to a class and print out
the values. Most of the time when I do a:

print <variable name>

I end up getting some hex value instead of getting something more
meaningful. Yes, I am refering to the contents of a pointer.

Since my development work is usually on a Sun, I am a little spoiled
and expect things to work just as they do on Sun or better.
And that just isn't the case with the dbx on Risc6000.

Another group in my company who work with Pascal (poor souls) cannot
even load the core with dbx. The dbx itself core dumps! This happens 
inspite of increasing the paging space which sometimes helps in loading 
large executables.

All this happens on the "Gold" release of 9021 AIX 3.1