Speaker
Description
Analyzing kernel crash dumps with drgn is powerful but demands fluency in drgn's Python API, kernel data structure layouts, and the right helper functions for each subsystem. drgn-mcp is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that exposes drgn's debugging capabilities as structured tools that AI assistants can call, enabling kernel developers to investigate crash dumps through natural language instead of scripting.
This talk is a live demo of a real-world investigation. I will use drgn-mcp to analyze a vmcore from a production RT kernel hang where rtmutex contention leads to a system-wide stall. This is a real customer bug affecting RHEL RT kernels. Starting from the vmcore with no prior analysis, I will walk through the entire investigation interactively, driven by natural language, with the LLM choosing which drgn tools to invoke to uncover the root cause live on stage.