On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 10:44:47AM +0530, Amit S. Kale wrote: > On Thursday 31 August 2006 02:10, Vivek Goyal wrote: > > On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 12:35:21PM -0700, Piet Delaney wrote: > > > > Simple question -- and to be quite honest with you -- I don't > > > > understand why you wouldn't want to simply use gdb alone > > > > in this case? > > > > > > I don't see any reason for core file not to be read correctly by > > > gdb. It's convenient to use gdb directly sometimes, for example > > > while using the ddd GUI. > > > > You can run gdb to open core files as of today but the debugging > > capability will be limited. For ex. kernel core headers have the info > > of linearly mapped region only and they don't contain the virt address > > info of non-linearly mapped regions. So one can not debug the non-linearly > > mapped regions like modules. > > Adding this functionality should be easy. One only has to create crash file > support for the osabi "Linux-kernel". For module debugging, the analysis tool shall have to know some kernel internals and traverse the page table. Gdb does not know about kernel internals and we shall have to write page table walker etc. Crash is already doing all this stuff. It also uses gdb as backend to retrieve important debugging info etc. So why to duplicate the effort and enable gdb to know about kernel internals and implement page table walker etc. Anyway, a user space utility knowing about kernel internals is bad because kernel changes so fast and keeping pace with it becomes an maintenance nightmare. On the side note, this year at OLS, maneesh conducted a BOF on sort of creating a library in kernel like klibc which is maintained with kernel and user space analysis tools can take advantage of that libarary and get some reprieve in terms of maintenace overheads. Thanks Vivek -- Crash-utility mailing list Crash-utility@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/crash-utility
