Gentoo for a system/kernel development virtual machine

[ddvlad]

Hello everyone,

I have been tasked with building a Linux-based virtual machine for use by students in two courses in our University. They both involve Operating Systems, one is roughly system programming, the other is kernel programming. I've (hopefully) convinced everyone that Gentoo is an appropriate choice, but I come asking for your help.

The point is to give students a working environment in which to write and test their homework, not to introduce them to a new distribution, so I have set a goal for myself to minimize $(grep -c '^emerge' ~/.bash_history) :-) Additionally, although I have used Gentoo happily for a few years, it was mostly as a desktop user. So I am not aware how one keeps debugging information in the compiled packages, for example. Any information in this particular domain would be greatly appreciated, as debugging symbols for libc are desirable, for instance.

In addition to the particular aspect of debugging information, I would also be interested in your suggestions for CFLAGS, USE falgs, or individual software. So far, I've listed editors (vim and emacs), smb and nfs support (along with a tutorial for each) and screen.

Finally, the virtual machine will also be used for kernel programming, which I have almost no experience with. The first restriction I put with respect to this is that the kernel should be vanilla. Other suggestions regarding the kernel's config or the build environment are welcome.

Thank you in advance for your suggestions,
Vlad

[dberkholz]

Add these things to your existing settings for FEATURES and CFLAGS:

FEATURES="splitdebug"
CFLAGS="-g"

This will build your packages with debuginfo and put the debugging bits into /usr/lib/debug/. If you're on x86, don't use CFLAGS="-fomit-frame-pointer" either.


You may also wish to provide full-fledged IDEs such as Eclipse. If they're using python, ipython is quite nice to have. For a basic USE setup, I recommend starting with a desktop profile to give you reasonable defaults.
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