Kernel dump file access library (repost)

[Petr Tesarik]

[Seems, I used the wrong address; sorry for possible double posting.]

Hi all,

during this year's SUSE HackWeek, my colleague started work on enabling
kernel core files in gdb. I realized that there would be at least four
different programs implementing read access to kernel dump files:

  1. the crash utility
  2. makedumpfile (when re-filtering)
  3. kdumpid (my project to get kernel version from a dump file)
  4. gdb-kdump (started by my colleague during HackWeek)

At this point, I felt that's too much re-inventing the wheel again and
again, so I took my current code from kdumpid and adapted it as a
library that can be used by everybody:

    https://github.com/ptesarik/libkdumpfile

In its current shape, it's usable, but far from complete.

Things that work already:
   - identify kdump file format
   - parsed meta-information from the header
   - open ELF, diskdump, makedumpfile, LKCD
   - read data by physical address (incl. Xen Dom0)
   - read data by Xen machine address

Things still on my TODO list:
   - more formats: sadump, kvmdump, libvirt, xc_core, xc_save
   - determine phys_base in ELF files
   - determine kernel release if not found in headers

Ideally, I would like to replace all current implementations with this
library, so if a new file format appears, or a new feature is added to
one of the files, it can be immediately used by all kdump-related tools.

Please let me know what you think.
Oh, and if you're developing such a tool, let me know which features
should be added.

Regards,
Petr Tesarik