Re: Re: [PATCH] Xen Guest Kexec

[Horms <horms@verge.net.au>]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 11:36:36AM +0000, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > I have been looking into various crash-dump options, and with that in
> > mind, exploring kexec for Dom0. I'm wondering if the patch above is
> > still the latest, and if this is still the prefered approach
> > for kexec in Dom0.
> 
> My patch was out-of-tree so it's rotted.  I've been waiting for various other 
> things to get sorted before it's worth updating it again (updating to a 
> kernel that actually has the kexec system call, one or two other patches).

Could you be a little more specific about that. I am pretty interested
in getting this working. As far as I understand Xen is now running
on 2.6.16-rc4 which does have kexec. I'm happy to put some cycles into
updating the patch, though I must confess I am quite interested in
Gerd's approach which is closer to what I was originally thinking.

> The patch wouldn't allow kexec for dom0 anyhow.  Enabling kdump for dom0 would 
> be useful.  I think there was somebody considering looking at this in the 
> future...

Understood. I was only talking of DomU with regards to the assisted
kexec patch that you sent earlier. I am also intersted in getting
kexec working in Dom0, however I agree with Gerd's statements elsewhere
in this thread that it can be acchived by porting kexec to Xen (or as
I understand it given the current state of kexec, teaching kexec a few
things about Xen in the prevailing architecture).

I'm actually quite interested in getting both kexec and kdump working
on both DomU and Dom0. I understand that for the most port there are
really four different problems there. I'd really like to help out
with existing efforts to help get all or any of them working.

For now I'm going to poke around with Gerd's idea of asking xend to
do system dumps for crash analysis of DomU, as that seems to be an area
of little activity at this time. 

-- 
Horms