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Vivek Goyal wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid20080418141028.GB1983@redhat.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 05:16:55PM -0700, Piet Delaney wrote:
</pre>
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<br>
I was thinking over lunch that the largest risk to whacking<br>
the task list might be a stack overflows. Perhaps a list of crash<br>
notes could be maintained with the allocation/freeing of the<br>
task structures. With the notes being so small it might not<br>
be too bad just to allocate an array based on some configurable<br>
maximum. Being able to dump say up to 1000 task notes would<br>
be more that sufficient for our systems. The wasted memory<br>
of allocating more memory than actually needed would be a <br>
small cost to ensure well debugged kernels.<br>
<br>
-piet<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid20080418141028.GB1983@redhat.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hey Guys:
I've been using kgdb for a while with our 2.6.12 and now 2.6.16 kernel
as well as kdump/kexec with our 2.6.16 kernel. I'm a bit disappointed
with the visibility of local variables on the threads/tasks not currently
running on CPUs. Both crash, and the gdb macros that you guys wrote,
show the most important stuff but I'd prefer to be able to see everything
with gdb/ddd as I can with kgdb; including all local variables and formal
parameters at each stack frame.
A long time ago I used gdb on SunOS 4.1.4 and use to simply set $fp
and $sp from the saved information in the U-block to view a process.
I wish gdb would allow be to run your macros, btt for example, and extract
the stackp from task.thread.esp assign it temporally to $sp for the
current task,
do the backtrace command and see everything. Changing $sp and $fp for a
while
like I use to do with gdb on SunOS 4.1.4 and then using ddd+gdb to
browse the
stack formals and locals would be nice. Just doing a 'set write on'
isn't sufficient,
gdb wants a process and I can't see to satisfy it with simply setting
the current
thread.
I was wondering if any of you guys have been thinking of anything like this
and had and hacks or ideas on how to see the locals and formals for all
tasks.
One thought I had was a minor hack of the kexec code to do something
like your gdb macros
and walk thru the task list and then append a ELF Notes, like done by
crash_save_this_cpu(),
for each task. I have no idea if gdb has a limit on the number of
elf_prstatus structures
that can be provided. I suppose I'd leave it a KEXEC config variable to
enable this, as
some would argue that it's not as save as simply saving the regs for the
active CPUs.
This would leave 'info threads' with gdb similar to 'ps' with crash and
virtually identical
to the experience with kgdb.
</pre>
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
IIUC, you are suggesting that we create elf notes even for non-active
tasks in vmcore. We should not be doing that.
- It is not safe to traverse through task list after system has crashed.
- We reserve the memory for elf notes at system boot. At that time we
have no idea how many task system will have at the time of crash.
I think following can be a way forward for your requirement.
- Either gdb should provide a SunOS kind of facility where one can
provide stack pointer and switch the task context. ( I don't know
if there is already a way to do that).
- Or one can write a user space tool, which parses original vmcore,
walks through task list, prepare elf notes for all the tasks and emit
a new vmcore which is fetched to gdb.
Thanks
Vivek
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