Currently, VMCOREINFO note information reports the virtual address of phys_base that is assigned to symbol phys_base. But this doesn't make sense because to refer to value of the phys_base, it's necessary to get the value of phys_base itself we are now about to refer to. Userland tools related to kdump such as makedumpfile and crash utility so far have made some efforts to calculate phys_base from memory mapping information on a variety of crash dump formats. But there's no guarantee to keep maintaining it in the future. This is also useful for crash dump mechanism running outside Linux kernel such as virtual machine hypervisor such as qemu dump, which ordinary users use via virsh dump, or ones implemented on vendor specific firmware. They cannot get phys_base without special mechanism because phys_base is kernel information. To get VMCOREINFO in vmcore, it's easy to use strings and grep commands like this; VMCOREINFO consists of simple string: $ strings vmcore-3.10.0-121.el7.x86_64 | grep -E ".*VMCOREINFO.*" -A 100 VMCOREINFO OSRELEASE=3.10.0-121.el7.x86_64 PAGESIZE=4096 ... Similarly, this is also useful to get value of phys_base in kdump 2nd kernel contained in vmcore using the above-mentioned external crash dump mechanism; kdump 2nd kernel is an inherently relocated kernel. This commit doesn't remove VMCOREINFO_SYMBOL(phys_base) line because makedumpfile refers to it and if removing it, old versions makedumpfile doesn't work well. Signed-off-by: HATAYAMA Daisuke <d.hatayama at jp.fujitsu.com> --- arch/x86/kernel/machine_kexec_64.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/machine_kexec_64.c b/arch/x86/kernel/machine_kexec_64.c index 4859810..e6d00a4 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/machine_kexec_64.c +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/machine_kexec_64.c @@ -334,6 +334,7 @@ void arch_crash_save_vmcoreinfo(void) #endif vmcoreinfo_append_str("KERNELOFFSET=%lx\n", (unsigned long)&_text - __START_KERNEL); + VMCOREINFO_LENGTH(phys_base, phys_base); } /* arch-dependent functionality related to kexec file-based syscall */ -- 1.9.3