Summary

In this chapter, you learned that there are many approaches to debugging the kernel. We even categorized them in a suitable manner to help you quickly decide which to use in what situation. This was one of the key points – not every tool or technique will be useful in every scenario or situation. For example, employing a powerful memory checker such as KASAN to help find memory bugs is really useful during the development and unit testing phases but typically impossible during systems testing and production (as the production kernel will not be configured with KASAN enabled, but the debug kernel will).

You will also realize that both hardware and software constraints play a role in determining which kernel debug features can be enabled.

Further, we showed the various approaches, tools, and techniques (even at times the API or tool names) for kernel debugging categorized in several tables. This can aid you in narrowing down your armory: which of them to use in which...