Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques

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® 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.

Best, a senior software engineer at IBM's Linux Technology in Austin, Texas, presents debugging techniques and tools to make programming for Linux operating system kernel and applications problems easier to solve. Each chapter focuses on a specific tool/ set of tools, and how to build and install such in the event that a particular Linux distribution does not supply that tool or its latest release. The guide includes helpful summary charts and Web resources for crash dumps, defined as "a reliable method of detecting, saving, and examining system problems." Annotation © 2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Steve Best works in the Linux Technology Center of IBM in Austin, Texas. He is currently working on Linux storage-related products. Steve has led the Journaled File System (JFS) for Linux project. Steve has worked on Linux-related projects since 1999 and has done extensive work in operating system development focusing on file systems, internationalization, and security. Steve is the author of numerous magazine articles, many presentations, and the file system chapters in Performance Tuning Linux Servers (Prentice Hall PTR 2005).

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