KDB enhancements

[Steven Dake]

On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 17:40, linas at austin.ibm.com wrote:
> Hi Keith,
> 
> I'm vaguely daydreaming about a few KDB enhancements, I was curious if 
> you've thought about them:
> 
> -- 'cat /proc/meminfo'  Turns out one bug I was chasing was OOM on
>    a machine with 32GB of RAM (!) and it took me days to even think
>    of looking there.
> 
> -- Support for examining structures symbolically.  I've had to walk
>    the buffer cache by hand in the past, I've walked task struct
>    by hand yesterday, and they guy down the hall stares at network
>    structs.  
> 
While we are dreaming :) complete source level debugging would be very
useful.  I was thinking this would best be done over serial or ethernet
with a kdb engine running in the target kernel.  This would allow a
debugger to use the kdb commands to symbolicly debug a running kernel.

Much better then kgdb, which lacks many of the functionalities required
by a good kernel debugger.

>    I don't know if it would be better to handle a few of these as 
>    special-cases in some simple manner, or if some more complex but
>    generic mechanism would be better ... 
> 
> --linas
> 
> 
>