Debugging and Profiling Linux Applications

Linux has an incredible selection of tools for both debugging and profiling applications to get the most out of the system. In this session, we will start with gdb and show many of the lesser-known features that can significantly shorten debugging time. Next we will focus on the profiling and code coverage features found in gprof/gcov for determining both the performance of function calls and whether your test code is actually testing all of the code that it needs to test via examining the code coverage of the execution. Next, we will go into more sophisticated approaches using strace, ftrace, oprofile and LTTng and show how they work and why you might choose one over the other for certain tasks.