November 2009
Intermediate to advanced
91 pages
1h 34m
English
Kernel probes can intrude into a kernel function and extract debug information or apply a medicated patch. It’s a useful addition to your debugging repertoire for investigating inexplicable behavior at a customer site, especially when you don’t have the luxury of rebooting the system. Linux supports a generic form of kernel probes called Kprobes and two specialized variants, Jprobes and return probes.
Kprobes can save you the trouble of building and booting a debug kernel by providing capabilities to dynamically dump kernel data structures or insert code into a running kernel. You can, for example, add a few printks on-the-fly inside the scheduler without recompiling the kernel. You can even ...
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