[Crash-utility] Xen Dumping - Expectations

[Jarod Wilson]

On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 14:02 -0400, Dave Anderson wrote:
> > I've been playing with xen dumping on x86_64 and x86 (RHEL5 20061006.2);
> > The following is a simple crash session on x86_64 (using "xm dump-core
> > -L"):
> 
> Interesting.  It kind of looks like there's something different about the
> corefile contents when using "xm dump-core" as opposed to forcing
> a "real" crash, i.e., such as when using sysrq-c?

Hrm, yeah, interesting... Last I tried with an actual forced crash of a
guest, everything looked as expected when I spun up crash on the
resulting core file. Of course, its been two or three weeks now, so it
coulda changed. ;)

> > Is xen dumping
> > supported on x86, x86_64, ppc, ia64?
> 
> x86 and x86_64 only -- ia64 is still TBD.

ia64... yeah... I can't even get a xen guest to install w/o panicking
dom0... :(

> > Can anyone point me to docs that
> > talk about xen dumping (e.g. internal/external wiki?)
> 
> None that I'm aware of...
> 
> The best thing that you can do is come over to my office,
> and we'll get to the bottom of this.  In the meantime, it would
> be interesting to know whether the behavior above is the
> same when you:
> 
> 1. log into the domU
> 2. echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

And another way to do it: if your domU has sysrqs enabled, then you can
issue 'xm sysrq <domU name> c' from the dom0. That's actually what will
get used for the rhts xen dumping test I've been meaning to finally
write for some time now... :)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com