Hey Guys: I've been using kgdb for a while with our 2.6.12 and now 2.6.16 kernel as well as kdump/kexec with our 2.6.16 kernel. I'm a bit disappointed with the visibility of local variables on the threads/tasks not currently running on CPUs. Both crash, and the gdb macros that you guys wrote, show the most important stuff but I'd prefer to be able to see everything with gdb/ddd as I can with kgdb; including all local variables and formal parameters at each stack frame. A long time ago I used gdb on SunOS 4.1.4 and use to simply set $fp and $sp from the saved information in the U-block to view a process. I wish gdb would allow be to run your macros, btt for example, and extract the stackp from task.thread.esp assign it temporally to $sp for the current task, do the backtrace command and see everything. Changing $sp and $fp for a while like I use to do with gdb on SunOS 4.1.4 and then using ddd+gdb to browse the stack formals and locals would be nice. Just doing a 'set write on' isn't sufficient, gdb wants a process and I can't see to satisfy it with simply setting the current thread. I was wondering if any of you guys have been thinking of anything like this and had and hacks or ideas on how to see the locals and formals for all tasks. One thought I had was a minor hack of the kexec code to do something like your gdb macros and walk thru the task list and then append a ELF Notes, like done by crash_save_this_cpu(), for each task. I have no idea if gdb has a limit on the number of elf_prstatus structures that can be provided. I suppose I'd leave it a KEXEC config variable to enable this, as some would argue that it's not as save as simply saving the regs for the active CPUs. This would leave 'info threads' with gdb similar to 'ps' with crash and virtually identical to the experience with kgdb. -piet
