Debugging the Linux kernel with printk messages is a common technique. And sometimes a good one. The problem happens when we only know this debugging technique. How to debug a kernel oops message? How to trace and understand the kernel execution? How to identify and analyze a buffer overflow? How to identify a memory leak or a deadlock in kernel space?

In many situations, there are more effective debugging tools and techniques we could use to debug the kernel, including KGDB, ftrace, addr2line, kmemleak, and so on. In this presentation, we will go over these and many other very useful tools to identify and fix problems in the Linux kernel.