On the Porting and Debugging of Linux Kernel

• Main Authors: Chih-Yuen Li, 李志遠
• Other Authors: Mi-Choc Chiang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84144129927749626348

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊工程學系研究所 === 94 === In recent years, more and more vendors adopt Linux to be the embedded operating system for their electronic products because of its combination of reliability, performance, good tool chains, portability, and configurability. However, Linux kernel is complex, and different electronic products may use different platforms. For this reason, it often requires that Linux be ported to different platforms. In this thesis, we describe the details of how we port Linux to a new platform which is similar to but not exactly the same as another platform and thus is not currently supported by the kernel. Moreover, we propose two robust debugging techniques to solve the problems we had encountered in this thesis. One is to make it easier to trace a module with ICE; the other is to allow us to access the internal registers of the processor through the /proc filesystem rather than write a program every time we need to access those internal registers for the purpose of, say, debugging. By using these techniques, we show that the time required to port and debug a Linux kernel can be definitely reduced.