From VMware’s Slava Malyugin: Debugging the virtual world..
My previous article
explained how to use Replay debugger with the kernel. The key benefit
of Replay is that you get 100% reproducibility of bugs with low
overhead, and can analyze the recording using existing debuggers.You
can debug Linux processes running in the Virtual Machine as well. The
approach is similar. First, you need to set up a replayable Virtual
Machine. The easiest way is to convert existing Virtual Appliance. Here
is how to do it in four steps:
There’s a little bit of kernel-specific fiddling that goes on (You need to know different offsets for different kernels, not that you have to recompile your kernel or anything), but for a developer this is like a virtual chainsaw and magic freeze ray combined.
The Replay feature remains experimental in the VMware Workstation
6.0.1. If you have a question or suggestion, or if you discovered a
bug, please post here. The engineers working on Replay are checking the forum and will be happy to talk to you.
Check out the new guestdebugmonitor community as well.
