Explore crash debugging skills in RISC-V devices, develop the skills to analyze binaries, and leverage cutting-edge troubleshooting features through hands-on techniques and expert insights
Key Features
- Diagnose and fix kernel panics, crashes, and system failures on RISC-V Linux boards
- Apply kernel concepts like interrupts and exceptions in practical debugging
- Explore various case studies for crash issues in practice
Book Description
When a RISC-V Linux system crashes, identifying the root cause can be challenging, especially when dealing with kernel panics, memory faults, or system hangs. Written by a Linux kernel engineer and author with over 15 years of industry experience, this book builds a strong foundation in crash debugging and guides you step by step through practical techniques for analyzing crash dumps and identifying the causes of system failures. This practical, three-part journey starts with the essentials of the crash debugging process, introducing common crash types, crash reproduction, and systematic troubleshooting steps. The second part walks you through the fundamentals of RISC-V and Linux kernel internals, including registers, exceptions, and virtual memory, necessary for crash debugging. The final part covers hands-on techniques for investigating kernel panics, exceptions, stack corruption, memory corruption, and system lockups using kernel logs, memory dumps, and debugging tools such as crash utility and GDB. By the end of this book, you'll have a structured approach to diagnosing RISC-V Linux crashes, with the practical skills to interpret crash signatures, analyze memory dumps, and identify root causes with confidence.
What you will learn
- Interpret RISC-V registers, exceptions, and crash signatures
- Analyze kernel logs to identify the causes of system crashes
- Examine kernel memory dumps using crash utility
- Investigate kernel panics, BUG conditions, and memory faults
- Diagnose stack corruption, overflows, and guard page faults
- Debug soft lockups, hard lockups, and hung kernel tasks
- Analyze crashes due to corrupted kernel data structures
- Debug user space crashes and core dumps using GDB
Who this book is for
This book is for embedded developers, system engineers, firmware engineers, security consultants, and ethical hackers. A basic understanding of C programming is recommended. Familiarity with computer architecture, Linux systems, and security concepts will help you get the most out of this book.
