Mark Lam's Blog: September 2007 Archive

You may or may not have noticed on the phoneME Advanced Downloads page, that there is a phoneME Advanced MR2 binary for WinCE / Windows Mobile 5. That's one of the projects that my esteemed colleagues and I have been busy working on in the past few months. That is part of the reason I have not been able to post much. So, I apologize for that.

Well, after being spoiled with all the rich debugging features available in gdb on Linux, working with WinCE has been ... ummm ... challenging. In the initial phases of bringing up the VM, any number of things could have gone wrong. Without adequate debugging capability, it is hard to figure out what has gone wrong.

One of the common things that can occur when the system isn't stable yet is a hang. When that happens, you really need to get hold of the thread stack traces in order to figure out where the hang is happening. Maybe there's a way to do this on WinCE (and VS2005 i.e. Visual Studio 2005) and I'm just ignorant about it, but what I found was that when the threads are all hung, I can't just force a break on all threads whenever I like in VS2005. Well, I can ... but I don't seem to be getting any thread stack info. What I heard was that when a thread is blocked inside some WinCE API, then VS2005 won't be able to give us a stack trace. Since hangs tend to be cases where the threads are all blocked in locks of some kind (i.e. using WinCE APIs), I was out of luck trying to get stack trace information.

But all is not lost. There's the VM Inspector (and cvmsh) and the thread dump hack for CVM Java threads that I'd introduced to you previously. However, I can't just use them as is yet. So, I added a little bit of enhancements ...

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