From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 24 01:01:46 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 37AD016A41C; Fri, 24 Jun 2005 01:01:46 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from canning.wemm.org (canning.wemm.org [192.203.228.65]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 19E4343D1F; Fri, 24 Jun 2005 01:01:46 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from fw.wemm.org (canning.wemm.org [192.203.228.65]) by canning.wemm.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F23FE2A8DA; Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:01:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from overcee.wemm.org (overcee.wemm.org [10.0.0.3]) by fw.wemm.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AAEE8E2B3; Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:01:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from overcee.wemm.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by overcee.wemm.org (8.13.3/8.13.1) with ESMTP id j5O11iwn059517; Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:01:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) Received: from localhost (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by overcee.wemm.org (8.13.3/8.13.1/Submit) id j5O11h51059516; Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:01:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) X-Authentication-Warning: overcee.wemm.org: peter set sender to peter@wemm.org using -f From: Peter Wemm To: obrien@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 18:01:43 -0700 User-Agent: KMail/1.8 References: <1e89cd51050616062241e9e201@mail.gmail.com> <200506222323.26666.peter@wemm.org> <20050623135337.GA44255@dragon.NUXI.org> In-Reply-To: <20050623135337.GA44255@dragon.NUXI.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200506231801.43669.peter@wemm.org> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Kernel Dump X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 01:01:46 -0000 On Thursday 23 June 2005 06:53 am, David O'Brien wrote: > On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 11:23:25PM -0700, Peter Wemm wrote: > > IA64 and Sparc systems usually had sparse memory configurations and > > the old raw format didn't have any facility to avoid storing holes. > > .. > > > I've just rewritten the AMD64 crashdump support to use ELF like > > ia64. In fact, I reused most of the ia64 code. We ran into serious > > problems at work, first on the amd64 platform and now also the i386 > > platform. The problem is that x86 machines are increasinly having > > memory holes. The simplistic dump code has no way to skip the > > memory hole and tries to dump things like the AGP frame buffer, pci > > card MMIO space, PCI-Express configuration space (this means > > accessing hardware!!) and so on. > > Hi Peter, > > This is great news! I'm really happy to see this work. Will we be > able to switch to this for 6.0R? I'd very much like for this to happen. I've been testing primarily with amd64, but Paul Saab is doing a quick port to i386 (should be trivial). The good news is that the libkvm impact is pretty much trivial. I was pleasantly surprised. There'll be patches to look at shortly. BTW: It turns out that sparc64 uses its own custom dump format. It uses a custom region descriptor instead of elf's core dump chunk descriptors. I believe it also passes a pointer to its kernel page table. -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5