Well, I have always been really interested in low-level system stuff and, specifically, development tools: debuggers, compilers. Recently, having a bit of free time to waste, I started hacking a small debugger. I must say that such projects are always extremely fun because they involve so many different layers of the system and require so much knowledge about arcane parts of the system.

So far, I have written a small elf32 parser which can perform symbol lookups on memory-mapped binary files. I also managed to figure out how to parse the in-memory loader link map. The thread_db library has managed to stay partly a mistery to me: it is not clear exactly what it is supposed to do and why the gdb/nptl developers decided to stick with this ugly interface.

I have yet to interface with ptrace and find a way to access the processor debugging registers. The latter seems to be a bit more complicated since these registers should be accessible only from ring 0 so, I need to figure out how to ask the kernel to do that for me. If you are a kernel developer and if you are reading this, please, tell me why on earth there is no alternative to the fugly ptrace. That thing is, well, really fugly.