[User-mode-linux-user] Best way to debug a device driver?

[Jeremy E. <je...@ci...>]

Hi,

I just discovered this project through this morning's freshmeat
announcement, and was really excited since I pulled a fairly large
amount of my hair out yesterday trying to debug a device driver (and
finally corrupting my filesystem after the machine crashed for the
umpteenth time).

My question for this list is: in your experience, what tools make for
the best approach for debugging a device driver that crashes the
machine?  Is this a good use for UML?  Or should I try to use one of
the remote kernel debuggers that runs over a serial port instead, to
debug an actual running kernel?

Will my device driver run in UML, given that it is a kernel module
that needs access to hardware ports (the parallel port control
registers, specifically)?  How about interrupts?

Thanks!

--Jeremy Elson