The kernel can be configured to contain a lot of introspection or debugging information built-in, such as ORC for unwinding stack traces, BTF for type information, and of course kallsyms. Debuggers could use this information to navigate a core dump or live system, but they need to be able to find it. This patch series adds the necessary symbols into vmcoreinfo, which would allow a debugger to find and interpret the kallsyms table. Using the kallsyms data, the debugger can then lookup any symbol, allowing it to find ORC, BTF, or any other useful data. This would allow a live kernel, or core dump, to be debugged without any DWARF debuginfo. This is useful for many cases: the debuginfo may not have been generated, or you may not want to deploy the large files everywhere you need them. I've demonstrated a proof of concept for this at LSF/MM+BPF during a lighting talk. Using a work-in-progress branch of the drgn debugger, and an extended set of BTF generated by a patched version of dwarves, I've been able to open a core dump without any DWARF info and do basic tasks such as enumerating slab caches, block devices, tasks, and doing backtraces. I hope this series can be a first step toward a new possibility of "DWARFless debugging". Related discussion around the BTF side of this: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/586a6288-704a-f7a7-b256-e18a675927df@xxxxxxxxxx/T/#u Some work-in-progress branches using this feature: https://github.com/brenns10/dwarves/tree/remove_percpu_restriction_1 https://github.com/brenns10/drgn/tree/kallsyms_plus_btf Stephen Brennan (2): kallsyms: Move declarations to internal header vmcoreinfo: Include kallsyms symbols kernel/crash_core.c | 14 ++++++++++++++ kernel/kallsyms.c | 23 +---------------------- kernel/kallsyms_internal.h | 30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3 files changed, 45 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-) create mode 100644 kernel/kallsyms_internal.h -- 2.30.2 _______________________________________________ kexec mailing list kexec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/kexec
