Current Linux Kernel debugging techniques

Question

A linux machine freezes few hours after booting and running software (including custom drivers). I\'m looking a method to debug such problem. Recently, there has been significan

Answer 1

If you can reproduce the problem inside a VM, there is indeed a fairly new (AFAIK) technique which might be useful: debugging the virtual machine from the host machine it runs on.

See for example this: Debugging Linux Kernel in VMWare with Windows host

VMware Workstation 7 also enables a powerful technique that lets you record system execution deterministically and then replay it as desired, even backwards. So as soon as the system crashes you can go backwards and see what was happening then (and even try changing something and see if it still crashes). IIRC I read somewhere you can't do this and debug the kernel using VMware/gdb at the same time.

Obviously, you need a VMM for this. I don't know what VMM's other than VMware's VMM family support this, and I don't know if any free VMware versions support this. Likely not; one can't really expect a commercial company to give away everything for free. The trial version is 30 days.

If your custom drivers are for hardware inside the machine, then I suppose this probably won't work.