Re: [Crash-utility] The problems when running SuSE 12 on VirtualBox
----- Original Message -----
>
> So my questions are:
>
> (1) Is it OK to use "/proc/kcore" instead of "/dev/mem" as a
workaround?
> Is there any side-effect?
As I read it, /proc/kcore is the kernel's virtual address space and
/dev/mem is the system's physical address space. It probably isn't wise
to debug the latter on any dom0 (whether nested in another
virtualization or not) except in very acute cases. It may explain the
problem you were having in the first place if VirtualBox affects whether
/dev/mem is a real physical memory view or if it doesn't then whether
VirtualBox itself affects those cases where, as I understand it, the
kernel has constant physical addresses for some things.
Hi Dave,
I'm not sure why /proc/kcore should be considered unwise? Even with a Xen
dom0 kernel, if it works, it works. All that crash is doing is taking the
physical address it normally would use for reading from /dev/mem (or /dev/crash),
and turning it into a unity-mapped kernel virtual address that it reads from
/proc/kcore. I might be missing something, but it would seem like the
virtualization aspect would be a non-issue?
/proc/kcore is a problem with 32-bit kernels, which cannot unity-map physical
memory above 896MB, but even with those, the session still comes up, albeit
slightly crippled.
Dave