Re: xm dump-core and analyzing

[Keir Fraser <keir@xensource.com>]

On 11/12/06 15:59, "Dave Anderson" <anderson@redhat.com> wrote:

> It does -- at least for para-virtualized x86 and x86_64 xenU kernels that
> have writeable page tables.  It's not clear to me whether it works on
> those xenU kernels with shadow page tables -- I have not personally
> seen it do so since we (Red Hat) ship x86/x86_64 xenU kernels
> with writeable page tables.
> 
> With respect to fully-virtualized kernels, it does not work due to the
> skipping of uninstantiated pseudo-pages in the xendump page list,
> the issue that John Levon reported here:

Cool! :-)  We'd like to work on this in the Xen-3.0.5 timeframe so the xenU
dumps use a less brain-dead format (in fact, using Elf would be a good
idea!). The current format is an ancient, non-extensible and largely
unmaintained hack; since format compatibility has to be broken we may as
well fix it properly. I already discussed this a bit with John Levon in the
email thread you referenced: we should emit an Elf section for each
contiguous region of (pseudo-physical) address space and then also we will
need Elf notes for non-shadow-pagetable guests to provide the phys-machine
relationship.

 -- Keir

> http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2006-11/msg01226.html
> 
> And in addition, I have been working all along with Magnus Damm with
> xen0/hypervisor vmcore support as well.