----- Original Message -----
>
> On Tuesday, March 03/27/18, 2018 at 18:47:34 +0530, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > Rahul Lakkireddy <rahul.lakkireddy@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> >
> > > On Saturday, March 03/24/18, 2018 at 20:50:52 +0530, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Rahul Lakkireddy <rahul.lakkireddy@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > >>
> > >> > On production servers running variety of workloads over time, kernel
> > >> > panic can happen sporadically after days or even months. It is
> > >> > important to collect as much debug logs as possible to root cause
> > >> > and fix the problem, that may not be easy to reproduce. Snapshot of
> > >> > underlying hardware/firmware state (like register dump, firmware
> > >> > logs, adapter memory, etc.), at the time of kernel panic will be very
> > >> > helpful while debugging the culprit device driver.
> > >> >
> > >> > This series of patches add new generic framework that enable device
> > >> > drivers to collect device specific snapshot of the hardware/firmware
> > >> > state of the underlying device in the crash recovery kernel. In crash
> > >> > recovery kernel, the collected logs are exposed via /sys/kernel/crashdd/
> > >> > directory, which is copied by user space scripts for post-analysis.
> > >> >
> > >> > A kernel module crashdd is newly added. In crash recovery kernel,
> > >> > crashdd exposes /sys/kernel/crashdd/ directory containing device
> > >> > specific hardware/firmware logs.
> > >>
> > >> Have you looked at instead of adding a sysfs file adding the dumps
> > >> as additional elf notes in /proc/vmcore?
> > >>
> > >
> > > I see the crash recovery kernel's memory is not present in any of the
> > > the PT_LOAD headers. So, makedumpfile is not collecting the dumps
> > > that are in crash recovery kernel's memory.
> > >
> > > Also, are you suggesting exporting the dumps themselves as PT_NOTE
> > > instead? I'll look into doing it this way.
> >
> > Yes. I was suggesting exporting the dumps themselves as PT_NOTE
> > in /proc/vmcore. I think that will allow makedumpfile to collect
> > your new information without modification.
> >
>
> If I export the dumps themselves as PT_NOTE in /proc/vmcore, can the
> crash tool work without modification; i.e can crash tool extract these
> notes?
>
> Thanks,
> Rahul
The crash utility will continue to work without modification. If the
dumpfile is still in its ELF format, crash will show the PT_NOTE header
and do a raw dump of the contents of the note (i.e., just a stream of
64-bit words, so if it's ASCII data, it won't be too useful). For a
compressed kdump, I believe that makedumpfile copies all PT_NOTEs
to the compressed dumpfile header, but the dumpfile header does not
currently contain a direct pointer to each note. Here is what's there
now in version 6 of the kdump_sub_header:
* struct kdump_sub_header {
* [0] unsigned long phys_base;
* [4] int dump_level; / header_version 1 and later /
* [8] int split; / header_version 2 and later /
* [12] unsigned long start_pfn; / header_version 2 and later /
* [16] unsigned long end_pfn; / header_version 2 and later /
* [20] off_t offset_vmcoreinfo; / header_version 3 and later /
* [28] unsigned long size_vmcoreinfo; / header_version 3 and later /
* [32] off_t offset_note; / header_version 4 and later /
* [40] unsigned long size_note; / header_version 4 and later /
* [44] off_t offset_eraseinfo; / header_version 5 and later /
* [52] unsigned long size_eraseinfo; / header_version 5 and later /
* [56] unsigned long long start_pfn_64; / header_version 6 and later /
* [64] unsigned long long end_pfn_64; / header_version 6 and later /
* [72] unsigned long long max_mapnr_64; / header_version 6 and later /
Note that explicit pointers only exist for the vmcoreinfo and eraseinfo notes,
but there are other notes (e.g., the NT_PRSTATUS and QEMU notes) that the crash
utility digs out of the full "size_note" segment of dumpfile memory that contains
a copy of all notes from the original ELF /proc/vmcore file. Anyway, there
would be no extraction/display of a new note type in a compressed kdump.
As far as extraction in a format of your liking, you can always post a patch
to the crash utility mailing list to extract and/or display it in whatever
format you desire.
Dave
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