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

How I debug this kind of bug, was to run my OS inside the VirtualBox, and compile the kernel with kgdb builtin. Then I setup a serial console on the VirtualBox so that I can gdb to the kernel inside the VirtualBox's OS via the serial console. Anytime the OS hang, just like magic sysrq key, I can enter ctrl-c on the gdb to stop and understand the kernel at that point in time.

Normally kernel stack tracing is just too difficult to pinpoint the culprit process, so the best way I think is still generic "top" command, just looking at the application logs to see what are the cause of hanging - this will need a reboot to see the log of course.