Turning a GDB Coredump Debug Session Into a Murder Mystery
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Turning a GDB Coredump Debug Session Into a Murder Mystery
Debugging an application crash can oftentimes feel like you’re an intrepid detective in a grimy noir detective story, tasked with figuring out the sordid details behind an ugly crime. Slogging through scarce clues and vapid hints, you find yourself down in the dumps, contemplating the deeper meaning of life and the true nature of man, before hitting that eureka moment and cracking the case. One might say that this makes for a good game idea, and [Jonathan] would agree with that notion, thus creating the Fatal Core Dump game.
Details can be found in the (spoiler-rich) blog post on how the game was conceived and implemented. The premise of the game is that of an inexplicable airlock failure on an asteroid mining station, with you being the engineer tasked to figure out whether it was ‘just a glitch’ or that something more sinister was afoot. Although an RPG-style game was also considered, ultimately that proved to be a massive challenge with RPG Maker, resulting in this more barebones game, making it arguably more realistic.
Suffice it to say that this game is not designed to be a cheap copy of real debugging, but the real deal. You’re expected to be very comfortable with C, GDB, core dump analysis, x86_64 ASM, Linux binary runtime details and more. At the end you should be able to tell whether it was just a silly mistake made by an under-caffeinated developer years prior, or a malicious attack that exploited or introduced some weakness in the code.
If you want to have a poke at the code behind the game, perhaps to feel inspired to make your own take on this genre, you can take a look at the GitHub project.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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Giuli spende trenta milioni nostri per un Caravaggio....meloni urla anche stavolta?
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I enjoyed and appreciated reading this post.
"I realized almost immediately that GNU/Linux and FreeBSD were so similar they were completely different."
This right here.
My initial impression with #FreeBSD in 2006 was quite similar. Of course, #Linux back then was a much different beast than what it has evolved (mutated?) into today.
Had I not pursued Linux system administration as a career, I *probably* would have stuck with FreeBSD.
We can make all the technical comparisons between the two OSes all day long but what drove my interest and enthusiasm are (1) the documentation and (2) the community.
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@peacelink ma non sono riuscite ad evitare di sbavare mentre lo dicevano
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@stefano Don’t bother filing a bug report. They will act stupid. Probably they are stupid about it. They think it is a bug. Actually the author probably wrote a program he knew was not a solution to the problem but which he could do on deadline and which was good enough for his job at HP.
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@stefano Here is something new for you to be upset about, though, which affects everyone, Linux, BSD, illumos alike. I have been upset about it for over 20 years.
Read ‘man 5 fonts-conf’ or whatever your equivalent is. Read it carefully under ‘FONT MATCHING’. What it says is that a font is not chosen as you wished, but instead RANDOMLY. You are only LUCKY if you get the font you wished.
And if you experiment long enough you will find this is true.
Fontconfig is unfixable and must be scrapped.
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L'Ucraina ha sviluppato nuovi missili balistici FP-7, analoghi all'ATACMS, ma due volte meno costosi
I test si stanno muovendo verso una nuova fase, i missili saranno testati direttamente in attacchi in Russia
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E in omaggio la concessione decennale per l'uso di un pezzo di bosco demaniale.
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@quinta non solo lo fa, ma se ne vanta pure.
