[drewg123]

The article talks about live debugging & stepping through code, which I agree, I almost never do. But post-mortem debugging of coredumps is a different thing entirely.

In my job on the kernel team at Netflix's Open Connect CDN, I do post-mortem debugging of kernel core dumps almost daily. On a fleet the size of our CDN, there will invariably be a kernel panic which you'd not otherwise be able to reproduce. In fact, I often use 2 debuggers: kgdb for most things, and occasionally a port of the OpenSolaris mdb for easily scripting exploration of the core.

My hat is off to all the people who made my debugging so much easier. Eg, the llvm/clang folks who emit DWARF, gdb folks who make the FreeBSD kgdb debugger possible, and the Solaris folks who wrote the weird and wonderful mdb.

[tzhenghao]

Yes to using debuggers for coredumps. I never found the whole UX of GDB good enough to displace my current print statement workflow, but for post analysis, it's really helpful when I can hit 'bt' (backtrace) and almost instantly see what went wrong.