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.

• 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

• 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

Module 2 - SPARC Architecture

• 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

Module 3 - Analyzing Bad Trap Panics

• 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

Module 4 - Analyzing Unique Panic String Panics

• 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

Module 5 - Analyzing User-Forced Crash Dumps

• 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

Module 6 - Analyzing Live Crash Dumps

• 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 crashdump file
• Diagnose an unkillable process
• Diagnose a memory leak

Module 7 - SPARC Assembly Language

• 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

Module 8 - SPARC Architecture Stacks and Arguments

• 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

Module 9 - SPARC Architecture Traps and Interrupts

• 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

Module 10 - Matching Assembly Language to C Code

• 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 thatassembly instruction (given a system dump and an instruction in a function)