Dark Arts Revealed: How to read Kernel Oopses and More

Many people consider kernel debugging an occupation that requires its practitioners to wear pointy hats, poke wands at their monitors and mutter in obscure languages.

This is not quite accurate. The muttering is entirely optional.

This tutorial tries to cater to the novice in kernel debugging. It will give an overview of different kernel debugging techniques, and some tools available. Real bugs and support cases from the Suse bugzilla will be used to illustrate how these techniques can be applied. Topics covered include:

• Care of magical critters! A taxonomy of kernel bugs
• Read the tea leaves! How to make sense of a kernel oops
• Cast real spells! Using the magic sysrq key
• Make the dead talk to you! Crash dumps and post mortem analysis
• Watch the invisible! Using kprobes and systemtap

The tutorial is intended for kernel developers and supporters interested in kernel debugging. A beginner level understanding of kernel internals will be helpful in following the presentation.

[Depending on the time available, we may have a break-out session with some hands-on experience - details to be announced]