[Crash-utility] crash without namelist?

[Dave Anderson]

----- "Jun Koi" <junkoi2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It seems that currently crash doesnt work without a namelist file?

Currently???  Never has, never will...

> 
> But I think sometimes we only have the System.map file in hand,
> without the namelist. Can we do anything with that? Because in many
> cases only some restricted operations are enough to debug the crashed
> dump.

The basic design of the crash utility is that it is essentially
a huge wrapper around the embedded gdb module, taking advantage 
of gdb's allowance of an alternative user interface.  So during
initialization, crash calls into the embedded gdb's main() function,
passing it the vmlinux file as an argument, and control comes back
to the crash code through gdb's command_loop_hook pointer. 

Even if the basic code flow were re-written, again, making it a 
completely different design, there are just so many requirements
that need structure member offsets in order to get off the ground,
I don't want to even bother thinking about them all.  Look at any
of the per-architecture *_init(POST_GDB) functions, and try to
envision crash running running without the offsets that it needs.

Dave