Re: [PATCH 0/2] kdump/mmap: Fix mmap of /proc/vmcore for s390

Vivek Goyal
2013-05-29T16:24:35Z

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 01:51:44PM +0200, Michael Holzheu wrote:
> On Tue, 28 May 2013 09:55:01 -0400
> Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, May 25, 2013 at 02:52:17PM +0200, Michael Holzheu wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > > Besides of the newmem mechanism, for completeness, we also
> > > implemented the oldmem ELF header mechansim in kexec. But this is
> > > disabled by default.
> > >
> > > See: "#ifdef WITH_ELF_HEADER" in kexec/arch/s390/crashdump-s390.c
> > >
> > > Currently no distribution uses the oldmem mechanism.
> >
> > Hi Michael,
> >
> > Mechanism to read from newmem is not there yet (your patches are still
> > being reviewed) and you mentioned that no distribution is building
> > kexec-tools with WITH_ELF_HEADER on s390. So how things are currently
> > working for kdump on s390?
>
> Hello Vivek,
>
> On s390, if we do not get the ELF header from the 1st kernel with
> "elfcorehdr=", we build the ELF header in the 2nd kernel. This is
> currently the default because WITH_ELF_HEADER is not defined for
> kexec tools.
>
> >>> START QUOTE
>
> [PATCH v3 1/3] kdump: Introduce ELF header in new memory feature
>
> Currently for s390 we create the ELF core header in the 2nd kernel with
> a small trick. We relocate the addresses in the ELF header in a way
> that for the /proc/vmcore code it seems to be in the 1st kernel (old)
> memory and the read_from_oldmem() returns the correct data. This allows
> the /proc/vmcore code to use the ELF header in the 2nd kernel.
>
> >>> END QUOTE
>
> For our current zfcpdump project (see "[PATCH 3/3]s390/kdump: Use
> vmcore for zfcpdump") we could no longer use this trick. Therefore we
> sent you the patches to get a clean interface for ELF header creation
> in the 2nd kernel.
>
> > >
> > > Therefore, if necessary, IMHO we can switch to the ELF header memory
> > > swap mechanism for s390 in the kernel. Of course we would then also
> > > have to adjust the (disabled) kexec code.
> >
> > So are you saying that s390 is ready to switch to mechanism of
> > creating ELF headers in first kernel by kexec-tools and new kernel
> > does not have to preare ELF headers?
>
> No, I meant that currently nobody is using the kexec tools ELF header
> creation in the 1st kernel on s390. We create the ELF header in the
> 2nd kernel (mainly because of our cpuplugd issue).
>
> Therefore, I think, we can safely change the ELF header creation in 2nd
> kernel to use your p_offset swap trick *and* we remove the swap code in
> the copy_oldmem_page() implementation (same kernel).

Ok. Got it. So s390 can fix it in kernel without creating any backward
compatibility issues (given the fact that nobody sees to be using
kexec-tools to build headers).

So please go ahead and fix it and that should solve your mmap() issue
too. Also please fix kexec-tools and that change will not be backward
compatible.

Thanks
Vivek