Development tools for the kernel

This document is a collection of documents about development tools that can be used to work on the kernel. For now, the documents have been pulled together without any significant effot to integrate them into a coherent whole; patches welcome!

Table of contents

• Coccinelle
  • Getting Coccinelle
  • Supplemental documentation
  • Using Coccinelle on the Linux kernel
  • Coccinelle parallelization
  • Using Coccinelle with a single semantic patch
  • Controlling Which Files are Processed by Coccinelle
  • Debugging Coccinelle SmPL patches
  • .cocciconfig support
  • Additional flags
  • SmPL patch specific options
  • SmPL patch Coccinelle requirements
  • Proposing new semantic patches
  • Detailed description of the report mode
  • Detailed description of the patch mode
  • Detailed description of the context mode
  • Detailed description of the org mode
• Sparse
  • Using sparse for typechecking
  • Using sparse for lock checking
  • Getting sparse
  • Using sparse
• kcov: code coverage for fuzzing
  • Usage
• Using gcov with the Linux kernel
  • Preparation
  • Customization
  • Files
  • Modules
  • Separated build and test machines
  • Troubleshooting
  • Appendix A: gather_on_build.sh
  • Appendix B: gather_on_test.sh
• The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN)
  • Overview
  • Usage
  • Implementation details
• The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer - UBSAN
  • Report example
  • Usage
  • References
• Kernel Memory Leak Detector
  • Usage
  • Basic Algorithm
  • Testing specific sections with kmemleak
  • Freeing kmemleak internal objects
  • Kmemleak API
  • Dealing with false positives/negatives
  • Limitations and Drawbacks
• Getting started with kmemcheck
  • Introduction
  • Downloading
  • Configuring and compiling
  • How to use
  • Reporting errors
  • Technical description
• Debugging kernel and modules via gdb
  • Requirements
  • Setup
  • Examples of using the Linux-provided gdb helpers
  • List of commands and functions