Kernel debugging with qemu's GDB server¶

General¶

The instances from OpenWrt in QEMU are listening on 127.0.0.1 TCP port 23000 + instance_no. We will use in the following example instance number 1. It is also assumed that the Kernel hacking Debian image is used as for this VM. The gdb debugger can be started from the linux source directory and all lx-* helpers will automatically be loaded.

Debugging Session¶

The debugging session with gdb can be started from the linux-next directory:

gdb -iex "set auto-load safe-path scripts/gdb/" -ex 'target remote 127.0.0.1:23001' -ex c  ./vmlinux

The module can now be loaded in the qemu instance as normal. But after that, we have to reload the symbol information via lx-symbol. This allows us to set any kind of breakpoints on the batman-adv module and to to get useful backtraces in gdb:

^C
Thread 1 received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
default_idle () at arch/x86/kernel/process.c:581
581             trace_cpu_idle_rcuidle(PWR_EVENT_EXIT, smp_processor_id());

(gdb) lx-symbols /home/sven/tmp/qemu-batman/batman-adv/net/batman-adv/
loading vmlinux
scanning for modules in /home/sven/tmp/qemu-batman/batman-adv/net/batman-adv/
scanning for modules in /home/sven/tmp/qemu-batman/linux-next
loading @0xffffffffa0000000: /home/sven/tmp/qemu-batman/batman-adv/net/batman-adv//batman-adv.ko

(gdb) b batadv_iv_send_outstanding_bat_ogm_packet
Breakpoint 1 at 0xffffffffa0005d60: file /home/sven/tmp/qemu-batman/batman-adv/net/batman-adv/bat_iv_ogm.c, line 1692.
(gdb) c