Re: Recommended virtualization technique for debugging/developing FreeBSD

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Bill Moran <wmoran_at_potentialtech.com> wrote:
> In response to Peter Schuller <peter.schuller_at_infidyne.com>:
>
>
>  > Hello,
>  >
>  > I was wondering what people use, in the abscense of suitable actual hardware,
>  > to debug/develop FreeBSD (the kernel in particular). I'm willing to resort to
>  > almost any host, including Windows, as long as I have something reliable.
>  >
>  > I haven't had much luck with qemu (crashes), nor virtualbox (crashes). I was
>  > going to go for vmware on Windows, but while it ran FreeBSD pretty well,
>  > before I had even percolated the disk layout enough to trigger the bug
>  > (required root-on-zfs) I was hoping to trigger, the vmware configuration tool
>  > crapped out on me and produced a configuration it could not itself read.
>  >
>  > What do all you regular kernel developers use, if not physical hardware?
>
>  I know that bochs was used during some of the initial development of
>  the amd64 port, because bochs can emulate amd64 on i386 hardware.
>
>  You're not going to see anything like impressive performance with bochs,
>  but it will allow you to see _everything_ the kernel is doing, i.e., you
>  can track each CPU instruction if you so desire.

For what its worth, I never used an emulator, nor even gdb, for
bringing up FreeBSD/amd64 to multi-user.  It was all done with printf
and a machine that booted up very very fast.  It was at loader prompt
in about 4 seconds from a power cycle.

The initial kernels were netbooted with pxe and later disk booted on
the machine that was set up for dual booting.  Not long after it made
it to multi-user, things like libc etc were all statically linked and
everything was seld compiled but with an external compiler.  I added
most of the missing bits incrementally.  David made the toolchain in
the tree work and eventually it self-compiled using the in-tree
compiler and toolchain.

Most initial debugging was done with a super-low-level serial console,
things like writing values to screen ram, 'hlt' intruction debugging
to diagnose insta-reboots, etc.

The initial address space size was 1GB.   512M for user, 512M for
kernel.  later came 4GB using i386's PAE strategies, then 512GB, then
128TB as I earned how to make pmap work.

It was a lot of fun, but I had no real debugging capabilities.  I
thought about bochs but never used it.  gdb wasn't available either.
I've never used serial gdb.

IA64 was different.  Doug Rabson used things like emulators/simulators
like Simics extensively, which had remote debugger (gdb?) hooks and
the like.

John Baldwin has been using qemu lately for bios/btx/loader work on x86.
-- 
Peter Wemm - peter_at_wemm.org; peter_at_FreeBSD.org; peter_at_yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete
themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell