CFP: RustINDIA Conference 2026

Overview:
While Rust is now integrated into the Linux kernel, the process for debugging Rust modules remains poorly documented compared to C. This talk provides a practical guide to using GDB for kernel-level Rust development.

We’ll go through a real debugging workflow - QEMU to keep your machine alive, KGDB to get GDB attached to the running kernel, and rust-gdb so that your types actually look readable. Then we get into the practical stuff: setting breakpoints on Rust symbols, following execution across the Rust-C FFI boundary, and making sense of a stack trace when a panic happens inside the kernel.
GDB doesn’t fully understand Rust. We will be talking about where it falls flat, like name mangling, enum variants, types that print as garbage and show what you can actually do about it.

Takeaways:
The QEMU + KGDB + rust-gdb stack is not as painful to set up as it sounds, and it gives you real visibility that pr_info! wont.

GDB needs some coaxing to work well with Rust, this talk shows you exactly where and how.

Target Audience:
Rust developers who’ve written or want to write kernel modules, are comfortable with Rust basics