Re: Linux Kernel Debugging Tools Monthly Meeting on Wednesday, June 28th

[Omar Sandoval <osandov@osandov.com>]

On Tue, Jun 27, 2023 at 01:05:12PM -0700, Omar Sandoval wrote:
> Hello! The next Linux Kernel Debugging Tools meeting is tomorrow,
> Wednesday, June 28nd at 11:30 AM Pacific time. This meeting is a forum
> to discuss development of Linux kernel debugging tools like drgn, crash,
> and more. I'm back from my parental leave, so I'll be hosting again
> (thanks, Stephen, for hosting while I was out).
> 
> The agenda so far is:
> 
> - The Linux Kernel Debugging microconference was accepted for Linux Plumbers.
>   Please submit talk proposals! We can discuss what people are planning
>   to present.
> - ORC format changes (see https://github.com/osandov/drgn/issues/303).
> - Upcoming drgn release.
> 
> Feel free to reply with anything else you'd like to add to the agenda.
> If you would like to attend, please email me offlist.
> 
> Thanks!
> Omar

Here are notes from the meeting:

- Guilherme G. Piccoli from Igalia joined and discussed some of the work he's doing to enable debugging on the Steam Deck. He's mainly using pstore with the ramoops backend.
- Stephen discussed the topic he's planning for the debugging microconference at LPC: an update on debugging without DWARF (using kallsyms and BTF/CTF instead).
- Guilherme discussed his microconference topic around general pstore awareness and improvements.
- We agreed that it makes sense for the microconference to not be strictly limited to "debuggers", but rather debugging as a whole.
- Omar hasn't decided what he's going to present. Perhaps something about fixing the pain points in debugging kernel code across versions/configurations (by using enums instead of macros, making it easy to bootstrap the debugger by providing enough information about memory layout, etc.).
- Stephen also mentioned his idea for providing BPF programs in the kernel that export knowledge of data structures to debuggers, which by his admission would be a ton of work but could help with a lot of portability issues.
- Omar gave an update on handling the ORC format change in drgn. This is now done.
- Omar is planning a new release of drgn this week.

See everyone next month!