[makedumpfile] extract vmcoreinfo from /proc/vmcore for Xen

Itsuro ODA oda at valinux.co.jp
Thu Sep 27 20:49:01 EDT 2007


Hi,

--- background ----------------------------------------------------
* what the makedumpfile is:
  To shorten the size of the dumpfile and the time of creating the
  dumpfile, makedumpfile copies only the necessary pages for analysis
  to the dumpfile from /proc/vmcore. You can specify the kind of
  unnecessary pages with dump_level. If you want to shorten the size
  further, enable the compression of the page data.
* Xen extraction 
  makedumpfile also has a feature that extracting the part of
  xen hypervisor and domain-0 from /proc/vmcore taken under xen
  environment. In most cases under xen environment, it is enough to
  analyze a cause of system crash.
* extract vmcoreinfo from /proc/vmcore
  makedumpfile 1.2.0 supports to extract the vmcoreinfo data from
  /proc/vmcore and uses it for dump filtering. (for a vmcore taken
  under the native environment.)
------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd like to support the "extract vmcoreinfo from /proc/vmcore"
function for the Xen extraction too.

I think a way of supporting this as follows:

* The hypervisor makes its vmcoreinfo at the initialize.
* add a new hypervisor call to get the hypervisor's vmcoreinfo.
  The hypercall would be a subcommand of the kexec hypercall.
* dom-0 exposes the hypervisor's vmcoreinfo via 
  /sys/hypervisor/vmcoreinfo
* kexec-tool looks /sys/hypervisor/vmcoreinfo and makes an elf-note
  according it

Any comments or suggestions are welcome before I will start to
implement it.

Thanks.
-- 
Itsuro ODA <oda at valinux.co.jp>




More information about the kexec mailing list