Commit 43019a56 authored by Ian McDonald's avatar Ian McDonald Committed by Adrian Bunk

Documentation: Update to BUG-HUNTING

Signed-off-by: default avatarIan McDonald <imcdnzl@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAdrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
parent a609164f
Table of contents
=================
Last updated: 20 December 2005
Contents
========
- Introduction
- Devices not appearing
- Finding patch that caused a bug
-- Finding using git-bisect
-- Finding it the old way
- Fixing the bug
Introduction
============
Always try the latest kernel from kernel.org and build from source. If you are
not confident in doing that please report the bug to your distribution vendor
instead of to a kernel developer.
Finding bugs is not always easy. Have a go though. If you can't find it don't
give up. Report as much as you have found to the relevant maintainer. See
MAINTAINERS for who that is for the subsystem you have worked on.
Before you submit a bug report read REPORTING-BUGS.
Devices not appearing
=====================
Often this is caused by udev. Check that first before blaming it on the
kernel.
Finding patch that caused a bug
===============================
Finding using git-bisect
------------------------
Using the provided tools with git makes finding bugs easy provided the bug is
reproducible.
Steps to do it:
- start using git for the kernel source
- read the man page for git-bisect
- have fun
Finding it the old way
----------------------
[Sat Mar 2 10:32:33 PST 1996 KERNEL_BUG-HOWTO lm@sgi.com (Larry McVoy)]
This is how to track down a bug if you know nothing about kernel hacking.
......@@ -90,3 +143,63 @@ it does work and it lets non-hackers help fix bugs. And it is cool
because Linux snapshots will let you do this - something that you can't
do with vendor supplied releases.
Fixing the bug
==============
Nobody is going to tell you how to fix bugs. Seriously. You need to work it
out. But below are some hints on how to use the tools.
To debug a kernel, use objdump and look for the hex offset from the crash
output to find the valid line of code/assembler. Without debug symbols, you
will see the assembler code for the routine shown, but if your kernel has
debug symbols the C code will also be available. (Debug symbols can be enabled
in the kernel hacking menu of the menu configuration.) For example:
objdump -r -S -l --disassemble net/dccp/ipv4.o
NB.: you need to be at the top level of the kernel tree for this to pick up
your C files.
If you don't have access to the code you can also debug on some crash dumps
e.g. crash dump output as shown by Dave Miller.
> EIP is at ip_queue_xmit+0x14/0x4c0
> ...
> Code: 44 24 04 e8 6f 05 00 00 e9 e8 fe ff ff 8d 76 00 8d bc 27 00 00
> 00 00 55 57 56 53 81 ec bc 00 00 00 8b ac 24 d0 00 00 00 8b 5d 08
> <8b> 83 3c 01 00 00 89 44 24 14 8b 45 28 85 c0 89 44 24 18 0f 85
>
> Put the bytes into a "foo.s" file like this:
>
> .text
> .globl foo
> foo:
> .byte .... /* bytes from Code: part of OOPS dump */
>
> Compile it with "gcc -c -o foo.o foo.s" then look at the output of
> "objdump --disassemble foo.o".
>
> Output:
>
> ip_queue_xmit:
> push %ebp
> push %edi
> push %esi
> push %ebx
> sub $0xbc, %esp
> mov 0xd0(%esp), %ebp ! %ebp = arg0 (skb)
> mov 0x8(%ebp), %ebx ! %ebx = skb->sk
> mov 0x13c(%ebx), %eax ! %eax = inet_sk(sk)->opt
Another very useful option of the Kernel Hacking section in menuconfig is
Debug memory allocations. This will help you see whether data has been
initialised and not set before use etc. To see the values that get assigned
with this look at mm/slab.c and search for POISON_INUSE. When using this an
Oops will often show the poisoned data instead of zero which is the default.
Once you have worked out a fix please submit it upstream. After all open
source is about sharing what you do and don't you want to be recognised for
your genius?
Please do read Documentation/SubmittingPatches though to help your code get
accepted.
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