On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 3:50 PM, Jordan Hubbard <j...@mail.turbofuzz.com> wrote: > Absolutely. In fact, before the advent of remote network debugging, FW was > totally the debugging method of choice since firewire target DMA lets you do > all kinds of useful things (as well as a few things that simply scare the > security guys to death ;-) ). > > My point was more that actually being able to debug a machine over the > network is such a step up in terms of convenience/awesomeness that if anyone > is thinking of putting any time and attention into this area at all, that's > definitely the target to go for. > > Looking at http://www.opensource.apple.com/tarballs/xnu/xnu-2050.22.13.tar.gz > there's even reasonable "documentation" on the kernel debugging protocol in > xnu/osfmk/kdp. Folks could do worse than try to clone it. The gdb debugger > macros in support of it are also in xnu/kgmacros. None of it is going to be > 'drop in' for FreeBSD by any stretch of the imagination, but it's always > easier to get to a destination when you have a map. :-) Anyone with a Mac > can also ""nvram boot-args="debug=0x144"" and test-drive it around, just to > see how it works in actual practice. See also: > https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KEXTConcept/KEXTConceptDebugger/debug_tutorial.html
Speaking of Apple solutions, I've recently used Apple's kgdb with the kernel debug kit & kdp remote debugging, to debug a panic'd OS X host. It's really quite nice, because the debug kit comes with a ton of macros, similar to kdb, and you also get the benefit of source debugging. I think FreeBSD would benefit massively from finding some way to share macros between kdb and kgdb, in addition to having an "emergency network stack" like you suggest. As Alan says, until then, there's firewire, and also gdbsx if your FreeBSD system is running as a Xen guest. --Will. _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
