C H A P T E R  16

Debugging

Debugging is part of the development process and the ongoing maintenance of a kernel level driver or extension. Therefore, having the skills and knowledge to debug the kernel effectively is an important part of a kernel engineer’s job description. Although great care is taken during the development and quality assurance process, bugs are often unavoidable. This is partly because, once released, your driver is likely to run against hardware/software combinations that haven’t been as well tested, if at all. For example, your driver may run on a faster or slower CPU than was tested initially, thus uncovering timing issues.

Many regard kernel debugging as a black art, and with good reason. When an application crashes, ...

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