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by lukan 875 days ago
"you might see the flag as 0 and eventually it would switch to 1"

Sorry, noob question: Were there easy avaiable tools (in the debugger), to monitor a variable like this and have the debugger stop exactly when it was going to change, so you could see which thread and function did it and why?
2 comments
jasomill 875 days ago
Yes: many debuggers support setting watchpoints[1] that break on writes to a particular memory location.

Depending on the platform and the debugger, these can be implemented using CPU architecture-specific debugging features, or in software, by single-step program execution and checking watched addresses for changes after each step.

[1] https://sourceware.org/gdb/current/onlinedocs/gdb.html/Set-W...

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DaiPlusPlus 875 days ago
Yes, x86 kernel-mode debuggers support hardware breakpoints that cause the attached debugger (running on a separate machine, of course) to break not just when a specific address/instruction is executed, but also whenever some address is written to (and also possibly read-from too, I think?)
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