Principles of OS Debugging

1. The most important bugs occur at customer sites, cause downtime for mission-critical machines, and cannot be deterministically reproduced

2. Customers should not and will not perform experiments and debugging tasks for us

3. We must be able to perform root-cause analysis from a single crash dump and deliver an appropriate fix

4. Debugging support for new subsystems is required at the same time as project integration

The above points were taken from slide 5, of Mike Shapiro’s presentation “A Brief Tour of the Modular Debugger” ca. 2000. Slides of the presentation available here.