An enhanced run-time kernel visual debugger

Abstract

Tremendous work has been achieved in operating system development. These efforts handed from both experienced and non-experienced developers targeting several milestones. Missing the full vision of operating system subsystems and hardware/software interaction brought up the desire for debugging the code. Ease of use and higher capabilities of the debugger were main goals for software vendors to satisfy developer requirements. Many subgoals were achieved on the way to reach the optimal debugger and many user requirements were added for such debugger. For instance, kernel initialization and multithreading are main issues should be addressed by the optimal debugger but only very few covering such issues. Several kernel debuggers exist for solving similar issues but only very few support line-by-line debugging at run-time. Furthermore, good visualization for in-detailed issues is main goal of such debugger in addition to the illusion of some performance measurements to the code being monitored. This paper presents a generic practical approach for operating system source code debugging in graphical mode with line-by-line tracing support. In the context of this approach, system boot up and performance evaluation of two operating system schedulers are addressed.