[erlang-questions] R12B-5 Help diagnosing erl_exit() from beam/copy.c:180

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 8:29 PM, Paul Fisher <pfisher@REDACTED> wrote:
> We've had an abort raised out of erts_send_message() -> size_object()
> and I would like to ask for some assistance in troubleshooting it.  (I
> only have a corefile because we run the vm with +d in order to diagnose
> driver problems from the corefiles.)
>
> In particular, I am having trouble understanding how to decode Eterm
> values, and therefore getting anywhere beyond basic "where it blew up".
>   Is there any description of the encoding beyond pulling apart
> erl_term.h macros?

There is a file with gdb macros include in the source distribution of
Erlang/OTP.
The file is named etp-commands and is found in the erts/etc/unix directory.

Use the source command inside gdb to source the file. The etp-help command
will give some hints to get started.

Use the etp command to decode and display tagged Erlang terms.

If the current stack frame is process_main() in beam_emu.c (#7 in your listing),
'etp I' will print the name of the current module and function, and
'etp-stacktrace c_p'
will show the complete call chain.

/Bjorn

-- 
Björn Gustavsson, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB