When printks are too many

Being too lazy to use proper debugging methods as I am (although what proper debugging methods are is sometimes debateable), I always (over)use printks to debug the kernel. Now the problem with printks is that when you find your bug they are all over the kernel code and it can be a real pain to remove them one by one.

This is not a trivial problem when you spend more than a couple of hours on a particular problem. The good news is that due to the nature of printk-debugging you usually know which one of your nasty hacks fixed the problem you were looking for. Thus you can git diff those to just keep the useful changes (I use emacs' ediff, meld or anything interactive should be good enough), then you commit just those.

You should learn from my mistakes and not blindly git checkout at the project root. For me there are usually some nasty device tree changes that I make to fit Qemu and also my .config is setup for debugging. I definitely dont want reverting any of that. Actually all I want to revert is the .c files I threw printks in.

git status | sed -n 's/.*modified: *\(.*\.c\)/\1/p' | xargs git checkout

Works 99% of the time. To avoid the tragedy of the other 1% make sure you take a look at git status beforehand.