[Crash-utility] Re: crash enhancements proposal

[Dave Anderson]

"Kurtis D. Rader" wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-05-08 10:58:39, Dave Anderson wrote:
> > I know I'm setting myself up for flames here, but why not use NFS?  Prior
> > to writing this, I was just looking at an x86_64 vmcore file stored on,
> > and NFS-mounted from, an x86 netdump server, and have done that many
> > times.
>
> That strategy is helpful but for my team not as useful as you might
> think. We only have one production server in our lab. It is an x86 system
> with eight CPUs and 8 GiB of memory. Everything else in our lab is used
> for problem reproduction. So you never know exactly what state they're
> in. And most of the lab systems have only 1 GiB of memory which makes
> analyzing large dumps an exercise in thrashing the disks. Our little s390
> system doesn't even have that much memory assigned to each LPAR. Also,
> we haven't been able to convince management to spend the money to upgrade
> our lab infrastructure. So we're limited to 100 Mbps ethernet between
> most of the systems.
>
> Heck, my desktop (dual core AMD 64 with 4 GiB of memory and two Western
> Digital Raptor SATA disks) is more powerful than almost all of my lab
> systems. As a consequence that is where I do all of my x86/x86_64 analysis.
>
> Dave, have you heard from rainer.bawidamann at de.ibm.com? He's leading an
> effort to create a cross-arch capable version of crash. Last I heard the
> current implementation only supports host=x86/target=ppc32.

No -- Corey Minyard from Monte Vista did a ppc32 implementation.
It was a ~15K lines-of-code patch that was way too intrusive to
ever consider for a RHEL version of crash.  Plus it made even the
simplest crash functions a pain in the ass, because for every single
memory access, it had to deal with 32-bit vs. 64-bit as well as endian
issues.  The patch was *really* ugly, but it worked for them...

Dave