It doesn’t matter whether you are a novice developer or an expert one, debugging is the task that you will likely spend most of your time doing. Int

Custom Kernel Debugging — Using GDB to debug dynamically loaded ELF files

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2021-06-21 23:00:06

It doesn’t matter whether you are a novice developer or an expert one, debugging is the task that you will likely spend most of your time doing.

Interestly, to my great surprise, very little focus is given by developers in terms of figuring out better ways to debug programs behaving unpredictably. It seems like debugging is an art lost and forgotten to time (unfortunately).

Yes, you might be wondering about so many advancements in the field and whether I seem to have forgotten those. No, I have not. They are fantastic tools/methods and there is nothing wrong with them but I have a gut feeling that most developers seem not to know how to use them to reduce troubleshooting time…. and that’s the scary part.

This blog post aims to document a recently fought battle to get gdb to allow me to properly debug my custom kernel the way I wanted.

When it comes to debugging C/C++ programs, GDB still one of the only options that can do the job well. Not because it’s easy and friendly because it isn’t (at least initially) but due to all of the already existing integrations with a multitude of tools out there.