Re: reading binarys

[Mike Stump <mrs at apple dot com>]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 2:11 PM, Jason Erickson wrote:
> I'm working on a project where every so often one of our games comes
> back and we pull the ram off the game for saving, and sometimes for
> anaylisis.  Currently the only varibles in ram that we can physically
> look at are the static members.  The information that we would love to
> get to is the heap memory and be able to know what dynamically
> allocated structure that heap memory belongs to.

Heap objects can be found by looking at stack and global variables.

> What I need to know, is there some way to read the binary with some
> program to figure out which order everything in memory is being
> allocated, so that I can write a program to read the memory dump and
> figure out which memory locations belong to which pointer varibles.
> Our code is written in C with litteraly tons of pointers.  It runs on
> the i960 processor (yeah I know...soo old...but it works and it costs
> a lot of money to change once its been approved).
>
> Any ideas would be appricated to be able to read the binary to figure
> out the order in which varibles get loaded onto the heap.

First, wrong list.  gcc-help is closer, but that is for compiler  
help.  Your question really has little to do with the compiler, but  
rather, debugging.  You could create a gdb remote stub for your game  
and then just fire up gdb with the `core file'.  Assumes that you've  
enhanced gdb to read your core files.  You can save off the -g built  
game and point the debugger at that code.  You then debug any data  
structures you want, using gdb.  If you just want a memory map, see  
the ld documentation.

If you're question is how do I write a debugger, please, don't do  
that, just reuse gdb.  It supports remote debugging and i960s just fine.