wine users - Mar 2007 - debugging an app which crashes my Window manager?

Hi all
    I'm running a Win32 application, Ecco Pro, under Wine on my Gentoo
Linux system. The app is 'mostly working' but there are some
circumstances where it repeatably crashes. I'd like to investigate
further to see if I can improve things. I have an embedded systems &
windows programming background, so I'm confident I have some of the
skills; however I'm a novice on wine.

I've made a start by running 'winedbg myapp.exe'. However when the
crash occurs kWin, the window manager for KDE which I use, is what
crashes. So I lose my winedbg terminal ;-(.

I'm starting to read the Wine developer docs but wondered if someone
could point me at a next useful step.

    Cheers
    Jon N

jkn wrote:
> Hi all
>     I'm running a Win32 application, Ecco Pro, under Wine on my Gentoo
> Linux system. The app is 'mostly working' but there are some
> circumstances where it repeatably crashes. I'd like to investigate
> further to see if I can improve things. I have an embedded systems &
> windows programming background, so I'm confident I have some of the
> skills; however I'm a novice on wine.
> 
> I've made a start by running 'winedbg myapp.exe'. However when
the
> crash occurs kWin, the window manager for KDE which I use, is what
> crashes. So I lose my winedbg terminal ;-(.
Instead of running the app in winedbg, set the environment variable 
WINEDEBUG. Something like "export WINEDEBUG=+relay" (I don't use
the
bash shell, so am unsure of the syntax). This will turn on the "relay"
debug channel. Now run the app, redirecting the output to a file. 
Something like "myapp.exe >& wine.log".

This will write out to a log file. The log file will likely be quite 
large, possibly hundreds of MBs. It also will slow down your app, so be 
patient. Once everything crashes, I usually split the log file into many 
smaller pieces. Something like "split --bytes=2m wine.log". That will 
create a bunch of 2MB files.

You probably want to see what was happening just before the crash. It 
might in the last file, but often a lot can still happen after a crash 
of Wine, so you might try seeing what files have the word "Exception".
Something like "grep xception x*".

If the last file or the file of interest is, say, xbc, then I will 
typically run it through a tool that comes with Wine, examine-relay. 
This will indent the file for you, which makes it easier to understand 
what is going on. Something like "/home/wine/tools/examine-relay xbc 
-f". The last "-f" parameter controls the formatting of the
output.

Just take a look at the output. If you have Windows experience, it 
should become quickly apparent what the output is telling you. Once you 
have narrowed the problem down to a particular area, you can change the 
WINEDEBUG environment variable to something that will give additional info.