The modular debugger (mdb) is an extensible, low-level debugger developed by

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

for the Solaris 7 operating system. It is now open sourced, under the

Common Development and Distribution License The Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free and open-source software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under o ...

(CDDL). Its source code is now available in all open source derivatives of Solaris, such as

Illumos Illumos (stylized as illumos) is a partly free and open-source Unix operating system. It is based on OpenSolaris, which was based on System V Release 4 (SVR4) and the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Illumos comprises a kernel, device d ...

History

The mdb project was started in 1997 by Mike Shapiro and others when the Solaris operating system was adding support for 64-bit architectures. Up until that point, Solaris was using the aging adb debugger developed by

Steve Bourne Stephen Richard "Steve" Bourne (born 7 January 1944) is an English computer scientist based in the United States for most of his career. He is well known as the author of the Bourne shell (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command-l ...

(initially for the AT&T SVR4 Unix distribution). It was very difficult to simply port adb from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture, so Sun engineers decided to make a new debugger that would feature enhanced debugging capabilities, while being backward compatible with adb.

References

* {{Solaris Debuggers

History

See also

References