ThomasLovén.com

31 Jan 2014

I still haven't quite caught up with all the stuff I wanted to write about back in August, but at some point when I started to write little userspace programs that wrote stuff to the screen, I thought my kernel debug messages started to get in the way.

I'm still not ready to give up debug messages from the kernel, so the best alternative seemed to be to output them to something else, such as a serial port.

Writing to a serial port is rather easy, so there's no need for me to go into detail there. I made a few changes to my emulation setup, though, that made showing the debug messages a bit nicer.

Tmux

I've described how I use tmux with qemu, gdb and telnet before. It was easy to add another pane which displays the debug information, but one thing at a time. Here's what I did in a bash script:

tmux split-window -h 'qemu-system-i386 -kernel build/kernel/kernel -initrd "build/tarfs.tar" -curses -monitor telnet:localhost:4444,server -s -S -serial file:serial.out'

This opens a new tmux pane with qemu running my kernel and loading tarfs.tar as a multiboot module. The -monitor flag starts a telnet server for controlling the emulator. -s starts a gdb server at tcp port 1234 and -S makes the emulator wait for a command before it starts running the kernel. Finally, the -serial flag saves all output from serial port 1 to a file.

The next step is:

tmux split-window -v 'tail -f serial.out | util/colorize.sh'

which opens up another tmux pane that displays the serial output using the auto-updating feature of tail. The script colorize.sh colorizes certain words of the output:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

C_NO=`echo -e "\\033[0m"`
C_RED=`echo -e "\\033[31m"`
C_GREEN=`echo -e "\\033[32m"`
C_YELLOW=`echo -e "\\033[33m"`
C_BLUE=`echo -e "\\033[36m"`

while read line; do
    echo $line | sed \
        -e "s/\(\[info\]\)/${C_BLUE}\1$[C_NO}/" \
        -e "s/\(\[status\]\)/${C_GREEN}\1$[C_NO}/" \
        -e "s/\(\[warning\]\)/${C_YELLOW}\1$[C_NO}/" \
        -e "s/\(\[error\]\)/${C_RED}\1$[C_NO}/"
done

Next is

tmux select-pane -L
tmux split-window -v 'i586-elf-gdb'
tmux select-pane -U
telnet localhost 4444

Which opens a new pane for the gdb debugger and then moves back to the first pane to open the telnet terminal.

Git

Notice the yellow lines in that screenshot? The ones that say

Kernel git data: [5e6074a (dirty)] Fri Mar 7 13:45:31 2014 +0100
(HEAD, harddrive): Ext2 unlink function. Untested.
Kernel compilation: Mar 7 2014 14:06:27

The data for this is stored in a special file called version.c

#include <version.h>

char * __kernel_git_hash = GITHASH;
char * __kernel_git_date = GITDATE;
int __kernel_git_dirty = GITDIRTY;
char * __kernel_git_message = GITMESSAGE;
char * __kernel_git_branch = GITBRANCH;

char * __kernel_build_date = __DATE__;
char * __kernel_build_time = __TIME__;

which has a special line in the kernel makefile:

version.o: CFLAGS += -DGITHASH='$(shell git log -1 --pretty="tformat:%h")' \
    -DGITDATE='$(shell git log -1 --pretty="tformat:%cd")' \
    -DGITDIRTY='$(shell [[ -n `git status -s 2> /dev/null` ]] && echo 1 || echo 0)' \
    -DGITMESSATE='$(shell git log -1 --pretty="tformat:%s")' \
    -DGITBRANCH='$(shell git log -1 --pretty="tformat:%d")'

A few more lines makes sure version.c is always recompiled if any other part of the kernel is:

kernel: $(kernel_objects)
    rm -f version.o
    $(MAKE) version.o
    $(LINK)

Obviously, this is a bit simplified. But not much. I might make a post about my makefiles some day...

But with this, I've kind of caught up. Neat! Back to programming ahead of myself!

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