[Info-vax] Crashing a system with PCA/DTM ?

[Marc Van Dyck]

John Reagan expressed precisely :
> On Sunday, August 26, 2018 at 12:08:26 PM UTC-4, Marc Van Dyck wrote:
>> Now time for a weird question.
>> 
>> Long time ago, I developped some code that later on became an important
>> component of our production environment. This was in Alpha times. So
>> important that I implemented a regression testing environment with DTM
>> and PCA, to ensure I didn't break anything with new versions.
>> 
>> This code was in fact quite stable so the regression environment was
>> not used very often.
>> 
>> 10 years later we migrated to Itanium and I just rebuilt, without
>> running the regression tests - all worked perfectly.
>> 
>> Now we migrated to VSI OpenVMS and my PCSI kit is broken, because it
>> insists on having HP OpenVMS installed. At the same time, I finally got
>> a request to implement a new function in my code (it's written in
>> Pascal).
>> 
>> So I dusted off the development environment of this code, made some
>> modifications, changed the PCF file to make a new kit for VSI, and
>> rebuilt. So far, so good.
>> 
>> Now I'd like to run my regression testing again. It's painful enough to
>> remember how DTM and PCA work, after having used it only once 15 years
>> ago. But my problem is that when I did that 15 years ago, I crashed the
>> development system. Twice. I'd like not to repeat that, but I do not
>> remember exactly how it happened.
>> 
>> I tend to remember it has something to do with images installed, and
>> possibly with privileges. My code is made of a shareable image,
>> installed /OPEN /HEADER /SHARED, and a main image that calls it,
>> installed with CMKRNL (it creates kernel mode logicals). Something
>> about that being not compatible with PCA or DTM (more probably PCA).
>> But the details escape me, it's too long ago.
>> 
>> Does that ring a bell to anyone ?
>> 
>> Thank you,
>> 
>> Marc.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Marc Van Dyck
>
> I don't remember that.  I've use PCA on a few things on Itanium in the past 
> year or so and haven't crashed our development cluster, but not with 
> installed images .  Are you doing performance work or just test system 
> coverage?

Just coverage.

> Unless you are doing screen-based testing or DECwindows testing, DTM is 
> pretty is just a bunch of tedious DCL command files.  PCA on the other hand, 
> is a debugger and should use many of the same interfaces (including SSI for 
> system service interception).  Perhaps there was an old bug with that? 

I'm sure that at that time, it was written in the (probably PCA)
documentation. Alpha, around 2002-2004. Not sure I still have those
manuals around, though...

-- 
Marc Van Dyck