Recently, I have had to use the GNU debugger (gdb) connected to a Qemu instance of a RISC-V processor to step through some kernel code.

Turns out that the Linux kernel is compiled with gcc -O2 flag for optimizations it needs during the build. This causes several problems for a debugger. One of them is that the gdb command info registers will show values as <optimized out>. Another issue is that single-stepping will make the debugger appear to jump back and forth across lines of code as code is stepped through with next or step gdb commands.

To circumvent this issue, I ended up with a hack that works well. I don’t claim this is recommended or correct, but it makes it through the build and gdb works fine. In my debugging, I have wanted to single-step through scheduler code in the __schedule kernel function. For this purpose, all I have to do is add the following to kernel/sched/Makefile.

CFLAGS_REMOVE_core.o := -O2
CFLAGS_core.o := -O0

This works brilliantly! What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Some more tips:

• CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO is needed to ensure kernel has debug symbols for gdb to load, and ofcourse CONFIG_DEBUG_KERNEL.
• CONFIG_FRAME_POINTER should be enabled to ensure stack unwinding, backtraces work correctly.
• CONFIG_GDB_SCRIPTS is a bunch of useful gdb scripts automatically load when a vmlinux is gdb’d.