Newbie question: core dump on Linux (and general Kaffe debugging)

[Patrick A Tullmann]

> ... it won't dump core, so I can't begin to think about debugging
> it ...

You can run it under gdb and then ^C it to see what's going on.
Or, break on initialiseKaffe() and 'next' from there.  

Generally, when Kaffe blows up early in the boot process and doesn't
print anything, then something is out of sync in the local
environment.  (For example, Kaffe has a hard time throwing a
'NoSuchMethodError' if it cannot load 'java.lang.NoSuchMethodError'.)
My guess is that its not a shared library problems, as those tend to
generate output, its probably a stack overflow on the main thread
(which takes a moment) generated by Kaffe not finding some critical
classes.  You might double-check that your .jar files are real .jars
and didn't get corrupted, etc.

Another method is to recompile with -DDEBUG (I think 
	'make clean all install EXTRA_CFLAGS=-DDEBUG' 
will do that for ya.)  Then, run 'kaffe -vmdebug list' which will
provide you with a long list of run-time debugging options.  For
example, 'kaffe -vmdebug INIT' would probably be the best place to
start.  If you think its a threading problem 'kaffe -vmdebug JTHREAD'
might help.  If you believe its all the fault of the GC, then shut it
off with 'kaffe -vmdebug NOGC'.

Also, 'sh -x `where kaffe` ...' is a good way to see just what is
being executed by the shell script.

-Pat