Re: [PATCH v3 00/21] kdump, vmcore: support mmap() on /proc/vmcore

Eric W. Biederman
2013-03-21T07:14:57Z

HATAYAMA Daisuke <d.hatayama@jp.fujitsu.com> writes:

> The breakage was caused by the introduction of new NT_VMCORE_PAD to
> "VMCOREINFO" name, except for which it worked fine. But it will be
> dropped in the next version. It'll be no problem for some time.
>
> The breakage was caused by makedumpfile itself due to the bug that it
> had so far seen note type only, not note name. It was possible to
> avoid the breakage by choosing another note name but I didn't do
> it. This topic will probably arise when some kind of new note types
> are needed.

Yes. Not ignoring unknown note types is a a deficiency in makedumpfile.
And definitely not something to keep us from introducing new note types.

It should be noted that a common use of /proc/vmcore is to do:
cp /proc/vmcore /somepath/core

gdb /somepath/core

makedumpfile is just an optimization on that for people who want to
write a smaller file.

Eric