Re: Lispm FORTRAN goes to Hyperspace

[moon@cambridge.apple.com (David A. Moon)]

It wasn't clear when you said the word "hang" whether you meant
that one particular process was not responding or the whole machine
was locked up.  If the latter, it wasn't clear whether some process
(perhaps the Fortran) was running with scheduling inhibited, or no
process was running and the whole system was waiting for something.
Here are some suggestions for how to get more information from inside
the guts of the machine while it's in this state.  This is all
documented, somewhere, I believe.

Try using the FEP debugger on an Ivory based machine to look around,
see whether your hung Lisp Listener is the running process or is
blocked, etc.  Get to the FEP and use the Debug command.  The Ivory
FEP debugger is quite knowledgeable about the various system data
structures.

Another wormhole you might be able to use is to press the Function
and Suspend keys, which puts you into a break loop in the cold load
stream, with process scheduling disabled.  You can't use commands or
the mouse, but between the DESCRIBE function and the ZL:DBG function,
which takes a process as its argument and puts you into the Lisp
debugger looking at that process, you can find out a lot.  Another
trick is (accept-from-string 'sys:process "<name of process>") to
get something that you'd normally get by pointing the mouse at it.

Either of these techniques can crash your machine sometimes, especially
if you do something you didn't really mean to, so be prepared to lose.