Tools and techniques to help determine the location of the Oops

While analyzing a kernel Oops, we can certainly use all the help we can get, right?! There are several tools and helper scripts that can be leveraged. Among them, and part of the (cross) toolchain, are the objdump, the GNU DeBugger (GDB), and addr2line programs. Besides them, a few kernel helper scripts (found within the kernel source tree) can prove very useful as well.

In this section, we'll start learning how to exploit these tools to help interpret an Oops.

Tip – Getting the Unstripped vmlinux Kernel Image with Debug Symbols

Many, if not most, of the tools and techniques to help debug kernel issues do depend on your having an unstripped uncompressed vmlinux kernel image with debug symbols. Now, if you've built both a debug and production kernel, as we've recommended from literally the outset of this book, you'll of course have the debug vmlinux kernel image file (which fulfills this...