Crash-Python 2022

Published: 24 October 2022
on channel: SUSE Labs

by Jeff Mahoney at SUSE Labs Conference 2022

Thanks to our conference sponsors, ARM and HPE, and our hosting sponsor and BigBlueButton provider, Blindside Networks.

Crash-python is a semantic Linux kernel debugger implemented in Python atop the GNU Debugger, gdb. Started as a Hack Week project many years ago, the crash-python project has continued to be a useful tool for folks needing to do advanced semantic kernel debugging in a familiar environment. Other tools have appeared in the kernel debugging ecosystem but have different enough interfaces that they have not been widely adopted within SUSE. The feedback I hear most frequently is about how slow it is to start up and how slow it can be performing big operations due to passing every read operation through Python twice. During Hack Week 21 this summer, I rebased the project on GDB 12.1 and implemented a very basic Kernel target in C as a GDB extension and reworked how symbols are identified and loaded, cutting startup time to a few seconds and improving performance overall. This talk will cover a brief history of crash-python, what's new in this version, and some useful real-life examples.

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