3. How to Debug

3.1. How to debug the security monitor (bbl) and the linux kernel?

We use QEMU+GDB to debug the security monitor or the kernel. QEMU is an effective way to debug them.

First compile with debugging symbols

# in your <build directory>
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..

From your build directory where you ran make, use:

./scripts/run-qemu.sh -debug

All cores will immediately hang at the first instruction (i.e., bootrom), waiting for gdb to be attached.

Now, run a riscv gdb in another terminal. You can feed it with the bbl binary or the kernel image to add debug information.

For example, if you want to debug with the bbl symbols

# in your <build directory>
riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu-gdb ./sm.build/platform/generic/firmware/fw_payload.elf

If you want to debug with the kernel’s debug information

# in your <build directory>
riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu-gdb ./linux.build/vmlinux

Then, attach to QEMU on the port printed by the starting qemu script:

(gdb) target remote localhost:$PORT

Now, you can start debugging the SM (bbl) or the kernel. Try to set breakpoints and run.

Before setting breakpoints, you should run following command:

(gdb) set riscv use-compressed-breakpoints no

QEMU provides a great option to collect the logs. If you add -D [filename] flag to the QEMU command, it will print out the logs into [filename].

You can also choose which kind of logs you want to print out, using -d [options] flag. For example,

./riscv-qemu/riscv64-softmmu/qemu-system-riscv64 -d in_asm -D debug.log #...etc...