Walk the Call Stack

Recently, I was working on a VMKernel core dump in which GDB's backtrace information for some threads was not reliable. This was due to a data structure holding the register values not having been updated before the kernel crashed. However, since whatever was running in the affected threads was probably still writing to the call … Continue reading Walk the Call Stack →

Backtrace Message Printer

A while back, as I was digging around inside a VMKernel core dump for an unnecessary amount of time, I started to wonder if I could write a program that would print an arbitrary string as its backtrace. You know, instead of outputting it onto the screen. All that you would have to do is … Continue reading Backtrace Message Printer →

About Me

My name is Tom and I currently work as a Senior Technical Support Engineer at VMware. As part of my job, I frequently analyze core dumps from kernels and, sometimes, from userworld processes. The main tool we use is GDB, as the cores typically come as ELF files. This blog is a way for me … Continue reading About Me →