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

[Robert P. J. Day]

  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.

  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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