On Wednesday 06 February 2008 04:08, Jan Kiszka wrote: > While too many people consider a debugger as _the_ tool for kernel > development, which it clearly isn't, it remains a fairly useful > feature, and I don't see any regression, technically or > organizationally, it may introduce to Linux. IMHO, it would be a pity > if kgdb have to remain out off tree and may potentially fall back at > quality levels that many of us had fought with in the past.
I do pretty much all my debugging with printk, not just because it is a pain to go find a working kgdb patch, but also because tools like uml make printk style debugging really fast. That said, I often find my development time sinking away into tedious activity like putting in a printk after each line of code, just to find out where some bad thing started going bad. At that point a source level debugger would save me a bunch of time and I would not have to remove the printks afterwards. However, if the time required to patch the kernel with kgdb is more than the time spent putting in prinks then I will just grit my teeth and put in the printks. Never mind that I will end up going through the printk insertion process many times, while only needing to apply the kgdb patch once. Ahem, that is once per kernel version, and I change kernel versions like I change socks (that means "often" for the wags among you.) One thing I like to do with a source level debugger besides debugging is take a walk once through some new algorithm I have implemented. Not because I think there is a bug, but more for the same reason that I like to do a side by side walkthrough of new code with another developer before ever running it. This just provides a different perspective, so that perhaps some little blemishes, inefficiencies and redundancies will show themselves, and the code quality usually improves because of it. Not that this is the only way I review my own code, it is just another way. More ways of reviewing code are better. In this sense, the debugger is like a mechanical friend who always has time available to join in a side by side code review. Regards, Daniel -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
