Re: insight will not start

[James Ingham <jingham@cygnus.com>]

Thomas,

 > 
 > 
 > System Cygwin/NT4.0/sp3/FAT_FS
 > 
 > After a delightful few hours of getting acquainted with insight, it got into
 > a strange loop and hogged the CPU so badly I had to hit the reset button.   
 > 

Can you remember what you were doing when this happened?  Sounds like
something it would be good to fix.  GDB itself can be pretty memory
hungry when you feed it big executibles.  It is particularly so when
you point it at large functions, since it generally assumes that it is 
safe to do all its analysis of the function in memory.  This can
sometimes cause NT to thrash pretty badly, particularly if your
machine doesn't have a lot of physical memory.

 > Two questions(possibly related).
 > 
 > 
 > Q1:
 > 
 > During the reboot, the file system check announced it found a file extension
 > without a filename which it moved to c:\found.000 directory.  Examination
 > showed this to be a mostly empty file with a sting of smilely faces as
 > header.

This is not something I would expect GDBTk to produce.  But I don't
know enough about Windows to know what kind of odd temp files it
produces when it is in the process of going south.

 > 
 > After reboot, my means of starting insight, i.e., entering cd
 > /cygnus/insight/bin ; ./gdb, no longer had the desired result.  The command
 > line prompt returns but the Insight windows never appear and gdb is not in
 > the task list.  I guess it just silently quits.
 > 
 > I may suppose that file which the file system check found to be odd and
 > moved was some sort of file necessary to the operation of Insight since it
 > appears to be the only thing that changed.
 > 
 > However, if so, deleting and installing the Insight FS would fix the
 > problem.  But it did not help.
 > 
 > Any suggestions welcome.  I really like what I saw and want Insight to work.

Well, we need to figure out where the error is occuring.  First of
all, it would be good to see if it is getting to the Tcl code at all.
Edit the file main.tcl in share/gdbtcl2, and up at the very top of the 
file put:

catch {

and down at the very bottom put:

} mssg
puts $mssg

Then try to start it up.  Does anything come out to the console?  If
yes, send us what you get, if no, then GDBTk is dying somewhere
earlier.  To figure out what is going on, you will probably have to
run gdb under itself (gdb -nw should still work), and try to trace the 
startup code to where it fails.

 > 
 > Q2:
 > 
 > There is a blurb in the cygnus web site which contains the link to download
 > Insight.  The blurb says that Insight should be installed in a install place
 > because it uses  DLL's of the same name as cygwin but which contain
 > different code.  I took this to mean to install it outside the normal cygwin
 > path.
 > 
 > However, this would seem to mean that Insight will then be picking up the
 > DLL's from the cygwin path locations.   Every thing did seem to work when I
 > first installed Insight (until the reboot described in Q1).  Once it stopped
 > working I tried various things including taking cygwin out of the path.
 > That did not help.  I also tried copying cygwin.dll into my working
 > directory so the debugee would be able to find it.  No help.
 > 

Windows looks first in the executible's directory for DLL's, and then
out on the path.  So as long as you installed the GDBTk tree in a
separate location from your ordinary Cygwin distribution, it should
find all the DLL's that came with it, and none of the Cygwin ones.
You should not have to monkey with paths to get it to work.

Jim