Enhancement of userspace debugging and observability features

[Jakub Jermář]

Improve or implement features for HelenOS userspace debugging and observability.

Details

This is an umbrella project for implementing the following tickets that should significantly improve the observability and debugging of HelenOS userspace:

#280 Taskdump should print fibril stacks
#312 Coredumps should contain register state
#314 Debugging information lost for some aborts

What Gains and Benefits will this bring?

User experience and performance of a human troubleshooter aided by these features should be greatly extended as he/she will receive more and better structured information about the problem and will be able to use standard tools (e.g. gdb) for post mortem analysis. In turn, this will enable us to fix some bugs more effectively thanks to improved bug reports and also reduced need to reproduce a bug before fixing it.

Difficulty

Easy to medium.

Required skills

A successful applicant will have good skills of programming in the C language and the ability to study information from various ABIs and processor manuals. The applicant will be exposed to the internals of the ELF format, so some familiarity with it is considered a plus. The applicant will also come across the HelenOS debugging interface, so it should be a system programming person rather than a strictly application programmer.

Documentation

Working with core files

Possible mentors

HelenOS Core Team, Jakub Jermar