Symbian: how to get stack trace on panic when running on device?

Question

Could somebody please give me a hint about how to get stack trace in Symbian. I'm experiencing KERN-EXEC 0 panic, but cannot locate it's origin. I've seen other SO questions about this, like this, but there's only a description of how to solve this problem on emulator. But my program deals with Wi-Fi and have to be run on device. Maybe there's some way of having the stack traced or break at panic?

Answer 1

I had the same problem which, the OS gives you no help whatsoever.

What I did, which solved my problem and actually helps a lot, it to come up with your own manual stack trace implementation. See parts of my version here (which happens to be the same question you linked to).

My answer has lots of pros and cons.

• Pro - you get a good stack trace that helps a lot in debugging.
• Con - lots of manual work to implement and to maintain.
• Con - may cause performance slow-downs (I set mine up so it only gets compiled for debug builds only).

Answer 2

KERN-EXEC 0 means you are using a bad handle, so check all your RClasses.

You can't debug system crashes on a production device. If you can build a custom ROM for your device then you can include the kernel extensions "exmondebug.dll" and "exmoncommon.dll", now when the device crashes it will drop you into the debug monitor. From here you can enter the password "replacement" dump out all the system stacks etc.. (type help for info).

If you don't have access to developer hardware, you can run custom Symbian^2 and Symbian^3 ROM images on QEMU with the Syborg baseport, I don't think it has wifi support but there is an Ethernet driver.

Answer 3

Don't your logs give you a hint? Add more logs around the place it crashes or comment out some blocks to see if the crash happens in them.