Oracle’s new debugging tools should help analyze and solve complex system problems for Oracle Linux.
Oracle has announced Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED), a collection of debugging tools for Oracle Linux. These tools, originally developed internally, are now publicly available and help analyze and solve complex system problems.
Tools for more efficient debugging
OLED brings together a set of tools specifically aimed at debugging problems for which existing methodologies fell short. Examples include capturing kernel stack traces with “kstack,” analyzing memory problems with “memstate,” and investigating corruptions in KVM images with “scanfs.
In addition, OLED offers “LKCE” (Linux Kernel Core Extractor), which can generate a report from a vmcore file without having to upload the file in its entirety. This can be valuable in crashes where sharing large files is practically unfeasible.
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Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics bundles debugging tools
The tools are developed in Python and C, while some associated scripts are written in dtrace and bash. Examples of concrete applications include monitoring CPU usage with ‘syswatch’ or estimating the size of vmcore files with ‘vmcore_sz’. The ‘scripts’ module also provides fine-grained debugging options with specific scenarios in mind.
Future plans
Oracle indicates that the tools will continue to be expanded with new features. Users who have specific debugging needs are encouraged to make suggestions through the Linux Support channels.
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