Linux Plumbers Conf 2010

One Line Summary

Abstract

In the last year the Linux kernel debugger has been completely restructured and improved. The 2.6.35 kernel added new capabilities for a local debug shell (KDB) as well as the capability for early debugging before console_init().

This presentation will touch on the current state of KGDB / KDB as well as future ideas and direction for the kernel debugger. The presentation will explain how to use the kernel debugger to diagnose an example problem found in a kernel module and trace the problem back to source code.

Finally the presentation will discuss other benefits that the kernel debugger and the polled I/O models could provide to the kernel. This includes possibilities ranging from more robust atomic Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) support to the possibility of simply being able to hit shift-page up or sysrq after the kernel has called panic() even when you don’t have KDB configured in the kernel!

Tags

kgdb, kdb, kms

Speaker

• Jason Wessel

  Wind River
  • Website: http://www.windriver.com/

  Biography

  Jason is a long time Linux developer since the early 90’s. He has worked on a wide range of projects over the years spanning from web servers, proxies, and qemu, to kernel drivers and debuggers.

  Jason currently works at Wind River as a product architect for the WR Linux core runtime. He is also the current kernel.org KGDB maintainer.