From owner-freebsd-arch Sun Feb 25 7:52:20 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 30F4C37B401; Sun, 25 Feb 2001 07:52:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from iedowse@maths.tcd.ie) Received: from gosset.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 25 Feb 2001 15:52:16 +0000 (GMT) To: Robert Watson Cc: Randell Jesup , arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Alfred Perlstein , Mike Sinz , Bruce Bauman , iedowse@maths.tcd.ie Subject: Re: ELF and diskless boot In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 25 Feb 2001 10:14:17 EST." Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2001 15:52:16 +0000 From: Ian Dowse Message-ID: <200102251552.aa44515@salmon.maths.tcd.ie> Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message , Robe rt Watson writes: > >I won't comment on the symbol stripping issue since I don't know >much/anything about that, but I can comment that we're in the process of >moving to using sysctl() for top and other kernel-grubbing utilities, when >used on a live system. top has already been changed to do this on >-CURRENT, and patches to systat/dmesg/vmstat/... are in the wings. While The reason that these utilities fail when not using loader(8) is that they depend on being able to look up static variables within the kernel using kldsym(). I think symbols declared as static end up with debugging information, so are only made available through some loader magic. It would be possible to go around the tree, removing the `static' from all symbols that are used by libkvm utilities - I've tried this, and it certainly fixes the problem with etherbooted kernels. It might also be possible to hack libkvm to try the old-style symbol lookup mechanism if kldsym fails to find a symbol. However, the move towards using sysctl() instead of libkvm will solve this problem completely. Thanks to Thomas Moestl and others who have done the work to make this happen! Ian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message