On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@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-pa...
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.
so ... if one was going to put together a (small) toolbox of kernel debugging tools, what's worth covering? interested in any feedback.
rday
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======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================
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Hi Robert, Good to know that you are preparing material. For linux kernel debugging, I would love if you could include, kdb, kgdb and also their setup environment, like now most people do development on Virtual Machine. So the debugger needs to be setup on the VM and its serial port to the host machine, where the debugging logs would be displayed. - Rohan