Understanding disassembly x86 + understanding function call + parameter pass and stack frame

[Saket Sinha]

Actually I need to ask you something rather than offering a solution.
Actually I have a similar sort of situation so I think I would ask here.

The issue I am facing is that I have been developing a filesystem
driver(over x86) which has become  "unstable"  by which I mean ,  at
compile time it is building but during runtime it fails when I call the
corresponding APIs from the user-space.

In order to find out exactly where it is failing, I need to debug the
driver.
I am very new to kernel development. I have heard about KGDB and KDB but it
takes quite a lot to get them working so waht are the other tools available?

Regards,
Saket Sinha




On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:36 PM, nidhi mittal hada
<nidhimittal19 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: nidhi mittal hada <nidhimittal19 at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:16 PM
> Subject: Understanding disassembly x86 + understanding function call +
> parameter pass and stack frame
> To: Kernelnewbies <kernelnewbies at nl.linux.org>
> Cc: Mulyadi Santosa <mulyadi.santosa at gmail.com>
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am using crash tool to analyze core dump obtained from red hat linux on
> x86_64 platform.
>
> And crash tool gives a stack trace of panic.
> But its does not show function parameters which were passed in this stack
> trace.
>
> So i have to disassemble and understand the value of parameters passed to
> these functions, while it panicked.
> Which i am not able to understand much.
>
> I would request help in knowing, how to understand disassembled function
> call , on x86_64 arch.
>
> Putting some of the doubts..
>
> a)like which sequence the parameters, return address, etc are pushed on
> stack?
> b)Which registers are used, if some registers play some spl. role ?
> c)lets say for a program a.c i use gcc -S a.c ...do we have some other
> command to generate
> somewhat more clear assembly code, may be with some comments in english
>
> Any kind of help in understanding this will be appreciated ..
>
> Thanks
> Nidhi
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Thanks & Regards
> Nidhi Mittal Hada
>
> http://nidhi-searchingmyself.blogspot.com/
>
>
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