Hi, Well this discussion has been going on for quite sometime now that what's the best way to capture the dump? There seems to be two lines of arguments.
Export ELF view through /proc/vmcore ------------------------------------ This basically involves retrieving saved core image headers and exporting those through /proc/vmcore interface. Further user space applications can be built on top of it to do advanced processing. Do Everything in user space --------------------------- The whole idea is that do all the processing from user space (preferably from ramdisk or so). When it comes to requirements, Distros and developers seem to be having somewhat different requirements. Distros: ------- - Fully automate the dump generation/capture process. - Configure everything in advance (like, dump storage location). - Upon crash, store dump image at pre-configured location and reboot into production kernel ASAP. Developers: ---------- - Keyword is simple and easy to use solution. - Should work well in a development environment where, not necessarily all the components (user space, kernel space) are in perfect harmony and things are yet to be stabilized. IMO, exporting /proc/vmcore is a good idea. It offers wide variety of choices to both developers and distros. - It provides the basic dump capturing mechanism in kernel. - Developers can store the dump image locally (cp) or transfer it over network (scp, ftp) using standard utilities and don't have to deal with additional user space utilites specifically designed for this purpose. - Developers can directly run gdb on /proc/vmcore generated image and do the limited debugging without need of any other dump capture/analysis utility. - Distros can build additional fully automated dump saving solutions on top of /proc/vmcore. Be it a init script or a custom initial ramdisk or something else....... So the whole idea is, that /proc/vmcore and user space solutions can co- exist. And let the user/distros choose between these based on their requirements. I was planning to implement /proc/vmcore. Do you have any comments or suggestions? Thanks Vivek - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
