Modular Debugger

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The modular debugger (mdb) is an extensible, low-level debugger developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris 7 operating system. It is now open sourced, under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

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Its source code is now available in all open source derivatives of Solaris, such as Illumos. [1]

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 (initially for Seventh Edition UNIX [2] ).

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.

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