• Michael Holzheu's avatar
    [S390] kdump: Initialize vmcoreinfo note at startup · fa8ff292
    Michael Holzheu authored
    Currently the vmcoreinfo note is only initialized in case of kdump. On s390
    it is possible to create kernel dumps with other dump mechanisms than kdump
    (e.g. via hypervisor dump or stand-alone dump tools). For those dumps it
    would also be desirable to include the vmcoreinfo data. To accomplish this,
    with this patch the vmcoreinfo ELF note is always initialized, not only in
    case of a (kdump) crash. On s390 we will add an ABI defined pointer at
    a well known address to vmcoreinfo so that dump analysis tools are able to
    find this information.
    
    In particular on s390 we have a tool named zgetdump. With this tool it is
    possible to convert dump formats on the fly using fuse. E.g. you can mount a
    s390 stand-alone dump as ELF dump. When this is done, the tool finds the
    vmcoreinfo in the stand-alone dump via the well known ABI defined address and
    it creates the respective VMCOREINFO ELF note in the output ELF dump. This then
    can be used e.g. by makedumpfile for dump filtering.  No more need for a
    vmlinux file with debug information.
    
    So this will look like the following:
    $ zgetdump --mount standalone.dump -f elf /mnt
    $ ls /mnt
      dump.elf
    $ readelf -n /mnt/dump.elf
    $ ...
      VMCOREINFO            0x00000474      Unknown note type: (0x00000000)
    $ makedumpfile -c -d 31 /mnt/dump.elf dump.kdump
    
    Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarVivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael Holzheu <holzheu@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMartin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
    fa8ff292
kexec.c 38.8 KB