CSE 306: Tools

Familiarity with your environment is crucial for productive development and debugging. This page gives a brief overview of the JOS environment and useful GDB and QEMU commands. Don't take our word for it, though. Read the GDB and QEMU manuals. These are powerful tools that are worth knowing how to use.

All of the tools that you need to execute and complete the labs are installed in your course virtual machine. Details TBA.

If you wish to compile and run the tools on your own machine, t any standard Linux development environment should work. Note that we cannot guarantee that these tools will run on your computer, and we cannot support these tools on your own computer.

Reference

GDB

See the GDB manual for a full guide to GDB commands. Here are some particularly useful commands for 306, some of which don't typically come up outside of OS development.

Ctrl-c

Halt the machine and break in to GDB at the current instruction. If QEMU has multiple virtual CPUs, this halts all of them.

c (or continue)

Continue execution until the next breakpoint or Ctrl-c.

si (or stepi)

Execute one machine instruction.

b function or b file:line (or breakpoint)

Set a breakpoint at the given function or line.

b *addr (or breakpoint)

Set a breakpoint at the EIP addr.

set print pretty

Enable pretty-printing of arrays and structs.

info registers

Print the general purpose registers, eip, eflags, and the segment selectors. For a much more thorough dump of the machine register state, see QEMU's own info registers command.

x/Nx addr

Display a hex dump of N words starting at virtual address addr. If N is omitted, it defaults to 1. addr can be any expression.

x/Ni addr

Display the N assembly instructions starting at addr. Using $eip as addr will display the instructions at the current instruction pointer.

symbol-file file

Switch to symbol file file. When GDB attaches to QEMU, it has no notion of the process boundaries within the virtual machine, so we have to tell it which symbols to use. By default, we configure GDB to use the kernel symbol file, obj/kern/kernel. If the machine is running user code, say hello.c, you can switch to the hello symbol file using symbol-file obj/user/hello.

Last updated: 2025-04-11 20:18:40 -0400 [validate xhtml]