Chapter 7. Introduction to adb

Before we talk about analyzing system crash dumps with adb, let’s talk about adb itself. The UNIX adb command is one of the oldest and most readily available UNIX debuggers. Although adb doesn’t provide flashy features such as a graphical user interface and the ability to work directly with source code, it is fairly straightforward and, among UNIX gurus, is accepted as the kernel debugger of choice. adb is not limited to examining kernel crashes, but better tools are usually available for finding problems with user programs and application packages.

The name adb, or absolute debugger, comes from the fact that adb deals primarily with absolute addresses, normally hexadecimal, and global symbols. It doesn’t know about ...

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