iPhoneTools

iPhoneTools package contains a few tools written to make your life easier while developing for the iPhone/OSX architecture.

Even though many of these tools are specific for the iPhone, others are perfectly working even in different Unix systems.

TraceAlloc Library

This is a memory block allocation tracing library, and it is described inside the TraceAlloc home page.

nma2n

This is a very simple tool that work with every symbol dump file generated by the nm utility. You pass it an nm symbol dump file and a series of addresses, and nma2n finds, for each address, the closest symbol.
To generate an nm symbol dump file, given a binary or a dynamic library, you simply run:

$ nm -n BINPATH > SYMFILE

Then you can run the nma2n binary to find out which symbols map to a set of addresses:

$ nma2n -f SYMFILE ADDR ...

The best way to build nma2n is to run `make` and `sudo make install` from the iPhoneTools directory.

fill-nmdir.sh

This is a shell script that is used to extract the set of nm dump files from all relevant iPhone dynamic libraries.

The fill-nmdir.sh script uses an auxiliary script named frmk-nmexport.sh that should be located in the same directory where fill-nmdir.sh is located.
The best way to use this tool is to create a directory inside your home directory, and populate it using the fill-nmdir.sh script.

$ mkdir ~/nmdumps
$ cd ~/nmdumps
$ $IPTDIR/fill-nmdir.sh $HEAVENLY

Where $IPTDIR is the path to the iPhoneTools directory, and $HEAVENLY is the path to your iPhone root file system.

This will create a number of .nmdump files inside the current directory.
On top of those system .nmdump files, you have to remember to drop inside the ~/nmdumps directory even the current nmdump for your latest build of your application.

Suppose your application latest binary files is $BINPATH, and your application name is $APP.app, you need to run:

$ nm -n $BINPATH/$APP.app > ~/nmdumps/$APP.nmdump

A failure to remember to update your application nmdump file, will lead to incorrect symbol detection for symbols inside your application.

crash-demangle.pl

This is a utility tool that I use to demangle the cryptic iPhone crash dump files generated inside the /var/logs/CrashReporter directory.
Once the iPhoneTools are correctly installed, given a CRASH.plist file extracted from the iPhone, you can get the demangled version by issuing:

$ cat CRASH.plist | $IPTDIR/crash-demangle.pl -D ~/nmdumps

memdmp-demangle.pl

This Perl script is for the TraceAlloc library, what crash-demangle.pl is for the iPhone crashdump generator.

The TraceAlloc library generate call traces that contain library/binary names and addresses inside libraries/binaries.

By using memdmp-demangle.pl you will be able to translate numeric addresses to function names:

$ cat MEMDUMP.mdmp | $IPTDIR/memdmp-demangle.pl -D ~/nmdumps