gdb on Linux Kernel dumps (gdb-kdump)
Andreas Arnez
arnez@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Tue Sep 22 17:56:00 GMT 2015
On Thu, Sep 17 2015, Ales Novak wrote:
> Hello,
>
> as was discussed at Andreas Arnez's talk during the GNU Cauldron 2015,
> it would be nice to be able to work with Linux kernel dumps using the
> ordinary gdb.
Agreed ;-)
> [...]
>
> The gdb-kdump should be considered rather as a proof of concept, yet it
> shows that enabling the kdumps in gdb should be principally easy. It is
> able to open the x86_64 and s390x kdumps. I'd imagine that most of the
> commands of the crash-utility could be reimplemented using the gdb's
> Python interface.
Right. As pointed out in the talk at the Cauldron, there are already a
few examples in the Linux kernel source tree under "scripts/gdb". In
addition, this post mentions another GDB-enhancing project for Linux
kernel debugging, named "LKD":
https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2015-06/msg00040.html
The LKD project focuses more on live debugging and thus might be a
useful complement to gdb-kdump.
>
> The example session looks like that:
>
> [...]
Very nice!
> We'd be thankful for any comments!
IMHO, it would be very useful if GDB had support for various Linux
kernel dump formats and for the Linux kernel runtime. It seems that
gdb-kdump covers both to some extent.
So, how to continue? Would you be able to convert gdb-kdump into
patches against upstream GDB and send those to the gdb-patches mailing
list?
--
Andreas
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