Daily Archives: January 21, 2016

Linux Kernel Analysis: Enable Linux Kernel Stack Dumping

As we know, if we want to know a special function and who will call it.
One of way is to use “cscope” to static analysis.

The following step is how we do it:

Enabling Stack Dumping in Linux Kernel
Enabling in Kernel Config
To enable the dump_stack() function in the kernel config the following options must be set. You can use make menuconfig or make xconfig to do this.

Kernel hacking -> Kernel debugging
Kernel hacking -> Verbose kernel error messages

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Enabling these two options will change the dump_stack() function from a do nothing function to dumping the stack.

You need to rebuild your Linux kernel image after enabling these options.

Using dump_stack()
Using the dump_stack() function is as easy as calling dump_stack() wherever you wish to print out the stack. This will cause a stack trace to be printed at that point.