I finally figured out why my debug symbols on Windows were messed up. By doing "!sym noisy", I saw that WinDbg found that nsd.pdb file was "mismatched" with nsd.dll, and therefore ignored it. That's why the backtraces it was giving me were so useless.
chkmatch.exe agreed that there was a problem. Oddly, it said the problem was and "Age mismatch" between for nsd.pdb and nsd.dll, whatever that really means. Interestingly, it reported that my nsd.pdb file WAS correctly matched with nsd.exe, just not with nsd.dll. Hm... Yep, the root cause of this problem was simply that the compiler was emitting TWO files named "nsd.pdb" into the same directory, and the second one for nsd.exe clobbered the first one for nsd.dll! To fix, I simply changed the (Windows only) makefiles to name the library files "libnsd.dll" and "libnsd.lib", here: https://bitbucket.org/apiskors/naviserver/commits/55797002913598dd2152d2bea4dba7bbeef589bf That's all it takes! Now I have separate nsd.pdb (for the exe) and libnad.pdb files, and once I set its symbol path correctly WinDbg finds and loads them without trouble. ------------------------------------------------------------ Some WinDbg commands to check this stuff: .sympath C:\web\nsd-32-tcl85\lib;SRV*C:\MyLocalSymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols !sym noisy lml .reload nsd.dll ------------------------------------------------------------ C:\web\nsd-32-tcl85>chkmatch -c bin\nsd.exe lib\nsd.pdb Executable: TimeDateStamp: 5456f3e9 Debug info: 2 ( CodeView ) TimeStamp: 5456f3e9 Characteristics: 0 MajorVer: 0 MinorVer: 0 Size: 62 RVA: 00059694 FileOffset: 00058094 CodeView format: RSDS Signature: {1fd5b2d7-be66-40cd-ac8f-84e2f61d4fe6} Age: 2 PdbFile: Z:\web\ns-fork\naviserver\nsd\nsd.pdb Debug information file: Format: PDB 7.00 Signature: {1fd5b2d7-be66-40cd-ac8f-84e2f61d4fe6} Age: 2 Result: Matched ------------------------------------------------------------ C:\web\nsd-32-tcl85>chkmatch -c bin\nsd.dll lib\nsd.pdb Executable: TimeDateStamp: 5456f3e8 Debug info: 2 ( CodeView ) TimeStamp: 5456f3e8 Characteristics: 0 MajorVer: 0 MinorVer: 0 Size: 62 RVA: 0010c1f4 FileOffset: 0010a9f4 CodeView format: RSDS Signature: {1fd5b2d7-be66-40cd-ac8f-84e2f61d4fe6} Age: 1 PdbFile: Z:\web\ns-fork\naviserver\nsd\nsd.pdb Debug information file: Format: PDB 7.00 Signature: {1fd5b2d7-be66-40cd-ac8f-84e2f61d4fe6} Age: 2 Result: Unmatched (reason: Age mismatch) ------------------------------------------------------------ Finally, here's my current HTML list of useful WinDbg links: <h4>The <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh406283%28v=vs.85%29.aspx";>WinDbg</a> Debugger:</h4> <ul> <li>Mike Taulty's <a href="http://mtaulty.com/communityserver/blogs/mike_taultys_blog/archive/2004/08/03/4656.aspx";>WinDbg debugger</a> tips <li>Moving <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/doronh/archive/2006/07/21/673317.aspx";>up and down</a> the stack <li><a href="http://windbg.info/doc/1-common-cmds.html";>Common commands</a> by purpose <li>A wordy <a href="http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=215";>cheat sheet</a> <li>Debugging the damn <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff560260%28v=vs.85%29.aspx";>symbol path</a> <li>The <a href="http://www.debuginfo.com/tools/chkmatch.html";>ChkMatch.exe</a> utility <li>Use <a href="http://www.debuginfo.com/articles/debuginfomatch.html";>.symopt+0x40</a> to load mismatched symbols <li>Use <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/744870/how-can-you-change-an-age-mismatched-pdb-to-match-properly";>How can you change an age-mismatched PDB to match properly?</a> </ul> -- Andrew Piskorski <a...@piskorski.com> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ naviserver-devel mailing list naviserver-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/naviserver-devel
