an online kernel crash book, and wondering what's deprecated

[Ezequiel Garcia]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>   in my online travels yesterday, i ran across this gem, "Linux Kernel
> Crash Book":
>
>   http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/crash-book.html
>
> and am now wondering about what would constitute a reasonable (and
> minimal?) list of canonical kernel debugging tools.
>
>   first, while the book above covers Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD),
> the author freely admits that it's been pretty much obsoleted by the
> more recent and flexible kdump, so there seems to be little value in
> digging into LKCD (or, in my case, adding any coverage of it to a
> kernel debugging course, which i am currently designing).
>
>   next, someone else's course i'm teaching next week has a kernel
> debugging chapter which opens with netdump and diskdump before moving
> onto kdump and kexec, but those earlier utilities are *also*
> deprecated these days,
>
> http://serverfault.com/questions/181554/how-should-i-capture-linux-kernel-panic-stack-traces
>
> so i would be tempted to skip any coverage of netdump and diskdump in
> favour of additional and more advanced coverage of kdump and kexec.
>
>   along those lines, i'm just digging into ftrace and was wondering if
> it in any way obsoleted systemtap, but i've heard from more than one
> source that while ftrace is allegedly more powerful, systemtap still
> has its place and is worth talking about.
>

While learning ftrace I found there's little good documentation for ftrace.
Ftrace is huge and very flexible, you can do lot more than just trace
your functions.

I firmly believe ftrace + perf should be consider like a serious
debugging technique.

Regards,
Ezequiel.