Re: [Qemu-devel] dump-guest-memory enhancement.

[Dave Anderson <anderson@redhat.com>]

----- Original Message -----

> I haven't been there at the original creation of this functionality, but
> I tend to agree with you. For analyzing the vmcore with gdb or crash,
> the alignment doesn't seem to be important, so it was probably ignored.

With respect to the crash utility, the p_align field is actually used
to differentiate kdump ELF vmcores from the old netdump ELF vmcores.
There are a couple subtle differences between the old netdump ELF vmcores
and kdump ELF vmcores.  Netdump ELF vmcores set the the p_align field to
the architecture page size, whereas kdump ELF vmcores have always had a p_align
field of zero.

Ideally these virsh-dump vmcores would continue to be essentially kdump
clones.  But if it's changed, then there will need to be an update to the
crash utility to work around it.

Dave