The purpose of this document is to explain how kcrash can be used to view UNIX SVR4 kernel structures. It is not designed to be a UNIX SVR4 Internals tutorial. Understanding and or interpretation of the data is largely left up to the reader and may in some cases require knowledge of UNIX SVR4 internals. See Appendix D2 for a bibliography.

We have provided macros that are not as yet a part of the general operating system release so that many more kernel structures can be viewed. Any macros that are available in /crash/macros and are used herein have been tested on 1.2, 1.3QT1 and 1.4 dumps. If changes were made to any macros in /crash/macros, a notation is made at the time the macro is used. All macros that have been used are included in Appendix C2.

The intent of the kernel structure diagrams is to show the structures that are referenced by others. By examining the diagrams, one can easily see the relationships of the kernel structures. All the structure diagrams are included in Appendix A2 and are in GIF format. An external viewer is not required.

As the UNIX SVR4 system has many different parts, we have chosen to document each separately. As each section is available, it will be added to the Web page. We chose to first document Streams, Queues and Messages. The second section discusses the SVR4 Virtual Memory System.

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KCRASH PART 2 : Introduction