On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 02:18:14PM +1000, Greg Price wrote: > The problem is not just for older versions, it's also every time a > structure is altered as dmods don't use CTF to locate the offsets. > > As an alternative, why don't we just bundle up mdb, dmods and macros > from a target system when taking a dump, then we should normally have a > debugger that matches the dump. The size of the binaries is > insignificant in comparison to the dump size. My preference would be to > have savecore grab them and keep them with the dump. > > Cheers, > Greg
The logistics of bundling those userland binaries with the dump are complex because you have to do it at dump time, not at savecore time. Fundamentally though if the interface boundary is truly evolving that rapidly you do need the self-extracting property in some fashion. My personal view is that it would make more sense to have the xVM kernel emit a dump of a guest VM in the extant canonical savecore format, keeping its virtual memory implementation details to itself. Fundamentally our dump format is simply a hash table of VA -> PFN mappings. It would make more sense to have the panicking dom0 contain the notion of how to emit its address spaces including those of guest VMs in that canonical format, and then libkvm would just work as is, and you would not have this continous revision problem. -Mike -- Mike Shapiro, Sun Microsystems Fishworks. blogs.sun.com/mws/
