CodeView Does Not Support Debugging Spawned Process

 Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
Article ID: Q58653
2.20 3.00 3.11 3.14 4.00 4.01 4.05 4.10 MS-DOS kbtool

The information in this article applies to:

  • Microsoft CodeView for MS-DOS, versions 2.2, 3.0, 3.11, 3.14, 4.0, 4.01, 4.05, and 4.1

The following are several reasons why CodeView doesn't provide debugging support for spawned processes in MS-DOS:

  1. MS-DOS is not a multitasking operating system. CodeView cannot start another thread/process to watch the execution of the spawned process.

  2. MS-DOS does not provide debugging support for the MS-DOS BIOS calls (Interrupt 21h). Since all spawn() and exec() functions in MS-DOS must go through the BIOS to run, CodeView cannot follow the spawned program.

  3. MS-DOS only recognizes 640K of memory; therefore, there is insufficient memory to debug a large program, since both the parent and child processes must reside in memory at the same time.

Additional reference words: kbinf 2.20 3.00 4.00 4.10
KBCategory: kbtool
KBSubcategory: CvwIss
Keywords : kb16bitonly

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Last reviewed: July 17, 1997
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