Chapter 3: Debug via Instrumentation – printk and Friends

Quick, think: how often have you interspersed printf() instances (or the equivalent) in your program in order to follow its progress as it executes code, and indeed, to see at approximately which point it (perhaps) crashes? Often, I'm guessing! Don't feel bad at all, this is a really good debugging technique! It has a fancy name to boot: instrumentation.

What you've been doing is instrumenting your code, allowing you to see the flow (depending on the granularity of your print statements); this allows you to understand where it's been. Often enough, this is all that's required to debug many situations. Do recollect, though, what we discussed in the previous chapter – a technique like instrumentation is typically useful in certain circumstances, not all. For example, a resource leak (such as a memory leak) defect is difficult, if not impossible, to debug with instrumentation. For most...