Learn Linux debugging and optimization--at kernel and application levels--hands-on!

This is the definitive guide to Linux software debugging and performance optimization at both the kernel and application levels. Using extensive Linux code examples, Steve Best systematically introduces open source tools and best-practice techniques for delivering bug-free, well-tuned code.

Drawing on his exceptional experience optimizing Linux systems for IBM, Best covers issues ranging from memory management and I/O to system processes and kernel bug messages. You'll walk through real debugging sessions, discovering the strategies experts use to debug even the most complex application- and kernel-related problems. You'll master sophisticated profiling techniques for identifying and resolving bottlenecks more quickly and learn how to capture the right data in the event of trouble. Coverage includes

• Bottleneck identification

• Code coverage

• Debuggers: gdb, kgdb, and KDB

• Memory management

• /proc kernel data analysis

• System process monitoring

• Network performance

• Oops bug messages

• Syslog and event logging

• Execution traces

• Profiling kernel behavior

• Cache misses

• User-Mode Linux

• Dynamic probes

• Crash dump analysis

• And more...

Linux(R) Debugging and Performance Tuning will be indispensable for every developer who needs to supercharge the Linux kernel and applications, and for every administrator and support specialist who must resolve Linux reliability or performance issues.

(c) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

A unique resource that shows Linux kernel and Linux application programmers how to write bug-free code that's optimized for performance. This resource includes: debugging tools and techniques for the Linux kernel itself and Linux applications; performance tools and techniques that show how to supercharge the kernel and the applications that run on it; and sophisticated profiling techniques that teach programmers how to uncover application bottlenecks. Like all books in the Arnold Robbins series, this book is written by Linux practitioners for Linux practitioners, and like all books in the series, this book contains many hundreds of lines of example program code from the Linux kernel and from real-world Linux applications. Though this book presents debugging strategy, it is fundamentally a hands-on Linux software debugging and performance tuning book.