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Operating Systems Linux Do you still googling error messages? Post 302811261 by wakatana on Thursday 23rd of May 2013 11:40:49 AM
Old 05-23-2013
Do you still googling error messages?

I am intermediate Linux user which has basic knowledge of programming (c, perl, js ...) and some system troubleshooting (strace, SystemTap, lsof ...) and I am tired of Googling the messages which comes to Linux logs (/var/log/messages). I would like to improve my Linux kernel knowledge. Since Linux (and it's utilities like ssh etc.) is open source there are source codes available somewhere. So my question is: How can I troubleshoot/debug Linux problems on source code level? Is this even possible for intermediate Linux user? Where to begin and how to improve my programming skills and Linux kernel knowledge this way? Any best practices are welcomed.

Something like this:

  1. Copy your error message
  2. Paste it to online search engine for kernel source codes which can be found *
  3. Now you have file name where it appears under kernel structures
  4. See folders and files structure contained in kernel here *
  5. You can deduce from file location what is purpose of this file under kernel, or find further documentation here *
  6. Use tool * to find further files in kernel on which your incriminated file depends
  7. Now read their source until it will be clear
  8. Now you can see under which conditions this message happens (if else statements)
  9. You can use software like * to debug or write some kind of exception to see when this message appears.

Thank you.
 

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DMESG(1)						      General Commands Manual							  DMESG(1)

NAME
dmesg - print or control the kernel ring buffer SYNOPSIS
dmesg [-c] [-r] [-n level] [-s bufsize] DESCRIPTION
dmesg is used to examine or control the kernel ring buffer. The program helps users to print out their bootup messages. Instead of copying the messages by hand, the user need only: dmesg > boot.messages and mail the boot.messages file to whoever can debug their problem. OPTIONS
-c Clear the ring buffer contents after printing. -r Print the raw message buffer, i.e., don't strip the log level prefixes. -s bufsize Use a buffer of size bufsize to query the kernel ring buffer. This is 16392 by default. (The default kernel syslog buffer size was 4096 at first, 8192 since 1.3.54, 16384 since 2.1.113.) If you have set the kernel buffer to be larger than the default then this option can be used to view the entire buffer. -n level Set the level at which logging of messages is done to the console. For example, -n 1 prevents all messages, except panic messages, from appearing on the console. All levels of messages are still written to /proc/kmsg, so syslogd(8) can still be used to control exactly where kernel messages appear. When the -n option is used, dmesg will not print or clear the kernel ring buffer. When both options are used, only the last option on the command line will have an effect. SEE ALSO
syslogd(8) AVAILABILITY
The dmesg command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/. DMESG(1)
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