From owner-freebsd-arch Sat Mar 30 11:25:17 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F5EA37B41A; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 11:25:14 -0800 (PST) Received: by flood.ping.uio.no (Postfix, from userid 2602) id 057A75346; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 20:25:11 +0100 (CET) X-URL: http://www.ofug.org/~des/ X-Disclaimer: The views expressed in this message do not necessarily coincide with those of any organisation or company with which I am or have been affiliated. To: Poul-Henning Kamp Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Rewamping kernel dumps... References: <3837.1017506387@critter.freebsd.dk> From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: 30 Mar 2002 20:25:10 +0100 In-Reply-To: <3837.1017506387@critter.freebsd.dk> Message-ID: Lines: 25 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/21.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Poul-Henning Kamp writes: > Here is what I plan to do to the kernel dumping code. > [...] Sounds good. > I understand that various people have some ideas about the layout of > the dump on the sequential media, this is an area I will not be involved > in, and I suggest people interested hash this out somehow. I uphold my earlier suggestion of a block of metadata formatted as text. To accomodate both sequential-access and random-access media, the size of this metadata block should be fixed (64k sound OK?), and it should be written out before and after the dump - before so you can read it and the dump off a tape without any seeking, and after so it can be found in a fixed location on a disk partition (since the dump is written at the end rather than the beginning of the partition). This eliminates the need for libkvm, and makes it possible to save a dump anywhere, anytime - currently, you have to run the kernel that crashed on the system that crashed, or an identical system, for savecore(8) to work. DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message