Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 06 Sep 2000 16:05:57 -0700 | From | "Matt D. Robinson" <> | Subject | Re: Availability of kdb |
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Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > > > > What would a debugger have done? > > > > Let the end user give me essential answers on what was happening at the failure > > point. Think of it as a crash dump tool with extra controls > > Sure. I just don't see many end-users single-stepping through interrupt > handlers etc. > > But yes, there probably are a few. > > But problems that tend to be hard to debug are things that don't happen > all the time. Or require special timing to happen. And I don't think > you'll find that those are very easy to attach to with a debugger either. > So the guy at the debugger end has to be really good. > > Basically, I'd hate to depend on that.
Then why not allow more complex post-failure analysis tools into the kernel as an option to debuggers? I agree that debugging should not act as a crutch for poor design up front, but at the same time, once you ship a product, you can't just ask the customer to "drop down into the debugger and give me a stack trace". If the system doesn't save the crash state for you, you might as well wave a magic wand over the system or pray that someone can read an Oops report.
--Matt - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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