Embedded Linux Conference Europe

Debugging, tracing and profiling are key tasks of any development process, including Linux kernel ones. In this area, the mainline Linux kernel comes with support for several internal events, probe primitives and break/watch functionality. Linux kernel communities provide many tools to use these features, either maintained in the mainline kernel, either available as external modules. Of course, no tool can replace a skilled developer with a good knowledge of the kernel, however that fact does not make tools useless either. In this presentation, Nicolas Launet will review several debugging, tracing and profiling tools freely available for Linux kernel development, expose how they work and discuss their strengths and limitations. The presentation will be illustrated with examples using kgdb, lttng, systemtap, perf and others.