CodeView Does Not Support Debugging Spawned Process

ID Number: Q58653

2.20 2.30 2.35 3.00 3.10 3.11 3.14

MS-DOS

Summary:

The following are several reasons why CodeView doesn't provide

debugging support for spawned processes under DOS:

1. DOS is not a multitasking operating system. CodeView cannot start

another thread/process to watch the execution of the spawned

process.

2. DOS does not provide debugging support for the DOS BIOS calls (int

21h). Since all spawn() and exec() functions under DOS have to go

through the BIOS to run, CodeView cannot follow the spawned

program.

3. DOS only recognizes 640K of memory; therefore, there is

insufficient memory to debug a large program, since both the parent

and child processes have to reside in memory at the same time.