[Patch v6 03/12] docs: qcom: Add qualcomm minidump guide

Mukesh Ojha quic_mojha at quicinc.com
Fri Nov 24 14:19:46 PST 2023


Add the qualcomm minidump guide for the users which tries to cover
the dependency, API use and the way to test and collect minidump
on Qualcomm supported SoCs.

Signed-off-by: Mukesh Ojha <quic_mojha at quicinc.com>
---
 Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst         |   1 +
 Documentation/admin-guide/qcom_minidump.rst | 272 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 2 files changed, 273 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 Documentation/admin-guide/qcom_minidump.rst

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
index 43ea35613dfc..251d070486c2 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/index.rst
@@ -120,6 +120,7 @@ configure specific aspects of kernel behavior to your liking.
    perf-security
    pm/index
    pnp
+   qcom_minidump
    rapidio
    ras
    rtc
diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/qcom_minidump.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/qcom_minidump.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..b492f2b79639
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/qcom_minidump.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@
+Qualcomm minidump feature
+=========================
+
+Introduction
+------------
+
+Minidump is a best effort mechanism to collect useful and predefined
+data for first level of debugging on end user devices running on
+Qualcomm SoCs. It is built on the premise that System on Chip (SoC)
+or subsystem part of SoC crashes, due to a range of hardware and
+software bugs. Hence, the ability to collect accurate data is only
+a best-effort. The data collected could be invalid or corrupted, data
+collection itself could fail, and so on.
+
+Qualcomm devices in engineering mode provides a mechanism for generating
+full system RAM dumps for post-mortem debugging. But in some cases it's
+however not feasible to capture the entire content of RAM. The minidump
+mechanism provides the means for selected region should be included in
+the ramdump.
+
+
+::
+
+   +-----------------------------------------------+
+   |   DDR                       +-------------+   |
+   |                             |      SS0-ToC|   |
+   | +----------------+     +----------------+ |   |
+   | |Shared memory   |     |         SS1-ToC| |   |
+   | |(SMEM)          |     |                | |   |
+   | |                | +-->|--------+       | |   |
+   | |G-ToC           | |   | SS-ToC  \      | |   |
+   | |+-------------+ | |   | +-----------+  | |   |
+   | ||-------------| | |   | |-----------|  | |   |
+   | || SS0-ToC     | | | +-|<|SS1 region1|  | |   |
+   | ||-------------| | | | | |-----------|  | |   |
+   | || SS1-ToC     |-|>+ | | |SS1 region2|  | |   |
+   | ||-------------| |   | | |-----------|  | |   |
+   | || SS2-ToC     | |   | | |  ...      |  | |   |
+   | ||-------------| |   | | |-----------|  | |   |
+   | ||  ...        | |   |-|<|SS1 regionN|  | |   |
+   | ||-------------| |   | | |-----------|  | |   |
+   | || SSn-ToC     | |   | | +-----------+  | |   |
+   | |+-------------+ |   | |                | |   |
+   | |                |   | |----------------| |   |
+   | |                |   +>|  regionN       | |   |
+   | |                |   | |----------------| |   |
+   | +----------------+   | |                | |   |
+   |                      | |----------------| |   |
+   |                      +>|  region1       | |   |
+   |                        |----------------| |   |
+   |                        |                | |   |
+   |                        |----------------|-+   |
+   |                        |  region5       |     |
+   |                        |----------------|     |
+   |                        |                |     |
+   |  Region information    +----------------+     |
+   | +---------------+                             |
+   | |region name    |                             |
+   | |---------------|                             |
+   | |region address |                             |
+   | |---------------|                             |
+   | |region size    |                             |
+   | +---------------+                             |
+   +-----------------------------------------------+
+       G-ToC: Global table of contents
+       SS-ToC: Subsystem table of contents
+       SS0-SSn: Subsystem numbered from 0 to n
+
+It depends on SoC where the underlying firmware is keeping the
+minidump global table taking care of subsystem ToC part for
+minidump like for above diagram, it is for shared memory sitting
+in DDR and it is shared among various master however it is possible
+that this could be implemented via memory mapped regions but the
+general idea should remain same. Here, various subsystem could be
+DSP's like ADSP/CDSP/MODEM etc, along with Application processor
+(APSS) where Linux runs. DSP minidump gets collected when DSP's goes
+for recovery followed by a crash. The minidump part of code for
+that resides in ``qcom_rproc_minidump.c``.
+
+
+SMEM as backend
+----------------
+
+In this document, SMEM will be used as the backend implementation
+of minidump.
+
+The core of minidump feature is part of Qualcomm's boot firmware code.
+It initializes shared memory (SMEM), which is a part of DDR and
+allocates a small section of it to minidump table, i.e. also called
+global table of contents (G-ToC). Each subsystem (APSS, ADSP, ...) has
+its own table of segments to be included in the minidump, all
+references from a descriptor in SMEM (G-ToC). Each segment/region has
+some details like name, physical address and its size etc. and it
+could be anywhere scattered in the DDR.
+
+Qualcomm APSS Minidump kernel driver concept
+--------------------------------------------
+
+Qualcomm APSS minidump kernel driver adds the capability to add Linux
+region to be dumped as part of RAM dump collection. At the moment,
+shared memory driver creates platform device for minidump driver and
+give a means to APSS minidump to initialize itself on probe.
+
+This driver provides ``qcom_minidump_region_register`` and
+``qcom_minidump_region_unregister`` API's to register and unregister
+APSS minidump region. It also supports registration for the clients
+who came before minidump driver was initialized. It maintains pending
+list of clients who came before minidump and once minidump is initialized
+it registers them in one go.
+
+To simplify post-mortem debugging, driver creates and maintain an ELF
+header as first region that gets updated each time a new region gets
+registered.
+
+The solution supports extracting the RAM dump/minidump produced either
+over USB or stored to an attached storage device.
+
+Dependency of minidump kernel driver
+------------------------------------
+
+It is to note that whole of minidump depends on Qualcomm boot firmware
+whether it supports minidump or not. So, if the minidump SMEM ID is
+present in shared memory, it indicates that minidump is supported from
+boot firmware and it is possible to dump Linux (APSS) region as part
+of minidump collection.
+
+How a kernel client driver can register region with minidump
+------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Client driver can use ``qcom_minidump_region_register`` API's to register
+and ``qcom_minidump_region_unregister`` to unregister their region from
+minidump driver.
+
+Client needs to fill their region by filling ``qcom_minidump_region``
+structure object which consists of the region name, region's virtual
+and physical address and its size.
+
+Below, is one sample client driver snippet which tries to allocate a
+region from kernel heap of certain size and it writes a certain known
+pattern (that can help in verification after collection that we got
+the exact pattern, what we wrote) and registers it with minidump.
+
+ .. code-block:: c
+
+  #include <soc/qcom/qcom_minidump.h>
+  [...]
+
+
+  [... inside a function ...]
+  struct qcom_minidump_region region;
+
+  [...]
+
+  client_mem_region = kzalloc(region_size, GFP_KERNEL);
+  if (!client_mem_region)
+	return -ENOMEM;
+
+  [... Just write a pattern ...]
+  memset(client_mem_region, 0xAB, region_size);
+
+  [... Fill up the region object ...]
+  strlcpy(region.name, "REGION_A", sizeof(region.name));
+  region.virt_addr = client_mem_region;
+  region.phys_addr = virt_to_phys(client_mem_region);
+  region.size = region_size;
+
+  ret = qcom_minidump_region_register(&region);
+  if (ret < 0) {
+	pr_err("failed to add region in minidump: err: %d\n", ret);
+	return ret;
+  }
+
+  [...]
+
+
+Test
+----
+
+Existing Qualcomm devices already supports entire RAM dump (also called
+full dump) by writing appropriate value to Qualcomm's top control and
+status register (tcsr) in ``driver/firmware/qcom_scm.c`` .
+
+SCM device Tree bindings required to support download mode
+For example (sm8450) ::
+
+	/ {
+
+	[...]
+
+		firmware {
+			scm: scm {
+				compatible = "qcom,scm-sm8450", "qcom,scm";
+				[... tcsr register ... ]
+				qcom,dload-mode = <&tcsr 0x13000>;
+
+				[...]
+			};
+		};
+
+	[...]
+
+		soc: soc at 0 {
+
+			[...]
+
+			tcsr: syscon at 1fc0000 {
+				compatible = "qcom,sm8450-tcsr", "syscon";
+				reg = <0x0 0x1fc0000 0x0 0x30000>;
+			};
+
+			[...]
+		};
+	[...]
+
+	};
+
+User of minidump can pass ``qcom_scm.download_mode="mini"`` to kernel
+commandline to set the current download mode to minidump.
+Similarly, ``"full"`` is passed to set the download mode to full dump
+where entire RAM dump will be collected while setting it ``"full,mini"``
+will collect minidump along with fulldump.
+
+Writing to sysfs node can also be used to set the mode to minidump::
+
+	echo "mini" > /sys/module/qcom_scm/parameter/download_mode
+
+Once the download mode is set, any kind of crash will make the device collect
+respective dump as per set download mode.
+
+Dump collection
+---------------
+::
+
+	+-----------+
+	|           |
+	|           |         +------+
+	|           |         |      |
+	|           |         +--+---+ Product(Qualcomm SoC)
+	+-----------+             |
+	|+++++++++++|<------------+
+	|+++++++++++|    usb cable
+	+-----------+
+            x86_64 PC
+
+The solution supports a product running with Qualcomm SoC (where minidump)
+is supported from the firmware) connected to x86_64 host PC running PCAT
+tool. It supports downloading the minidump produced from product to the
+host PC over USB or to save the minidump to the product attached storage
+device(UFS/eMMC/SD Card) into minidump dedicated partition.
+
+By default, dumps are downloaded via USB to the attached x86_64 PC running
+PCAT (Qualcomm tool) software. Upon download, we will see a set of binary
+blobs starting with name ``md_*`` in PCAT configured directory in x86_64
+machine, so for above example from the client it will be ``md_REGION_A.BIN``.
+This binary blob depends on region content to determine whether it needs
+external parser support to get the content of the region, so for simple
+plain ASCII text we don't need any parsing and the content can be seen
+just opening the binary file.
+
+To collect the dump to attached storage type, one needs to write appropriate
+value to IMEM register, in that case dumps are collected in rawdump
+partition on the product device itself.
+
+One needs to read the entire rawdump partition and pull out content to
+save it onto the attached x86_64 machine over USB. Later, this rawdump
+can be passed to another tool (``dexter.exe`` [Qualcomm tool]) which
+converts this into the similar binary blobs which we have got it when
+download type was set to USB, i.e. a set of registered regions as blobs
+and their name starts with ``md_*``.
+
+Replacing the ``dexter.exe`` with some open source tool can be added as future
+scope of this document.
-- 
2.7.4




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