How to open and use the exec debug interface

Author

Alfkil Wennermark
Copyright (c) 2010 Alfkil Wennermark
Used by permission.

Tutorial

Next step in my small series concerns itself with how to open and use the "secret" (but very useful) debug interface. Thanks to Steven Solie and Thomas Frieden.

Probably the best way to trap exceptions from within your code is to use the debug interface, that is "hidden" inside exec.library. The main problem with this interface is, that it is not very well documented. My main source of documentation on this issue is the amigaos-nat.c file from Thomas Friedens GDB sources. These can be found inside the adtools project on sourceforge.net.

The following code just plainly opens the interface, attaches a debug hook to itself, causes an exception and tells you what has happened. Normally you wouldn't attach the hook to your own process. Rather you would open whatever code you want to debug with fx. LoadSeg(), run it with CreateNewProc() (or some other way) and attach the debug hook to it. To keep things simple, though, this code just attaches the hook to itself.