> 2) Satisfying your own personal curiosity -- sometimes things are just inherently interesting to you, and it's usually worth chasing those things down, I've found. It may not be immediately applicable, but usually I'll figure out how to apply it somewhere.
A few months ago, while searching for a personal project, I stumbled across a mention that the performance events on Linux can be used to set hardware watchpoints. Literally the very next day at work, we had a problem where we needed a watchpoint but gdb was too intrusive to timing to let the bug happen, so I was able to fall back on perf to confirm the stack trace of the site corrupting memory.
Debugging is ultimately about hypothesizing which part of the system is failing and why, so understanding more of how your system works is likely to be beneficial towards future debugging sessions.
A few months ago, while searching for a personal project, I stumbled across a mention that the performance events on Linux can be used to set hardware watchpoints. Literally the very next day at work, we had a problem where we needed a watchpoint but gdb was too intrusive to timing to let the bug happen, so I was able to fall back on perf to confirm the stack trace of the site corrupting memory.
Debugging is ultimately about hypothesizing which part of the system is failing and why, so understanding more of how your system works is likely to be beneficial towards future debugging sessions.