On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 10:32:26AM -0500, Dave Anderson wrote:
With respect to this long-running thread:
[Crash-utility] Question for ARM developers/users w/respect to makedumpfile
https://www.redhat.com/archives/crash-utility/2013-January/msg00049.html
and the kludge/patch that went into crash-6.1.3:
- Workaround for the "crash --osrelease dumpfile" option to be able
to work with malformed ARM compressed kdump headers. ARM compressed
kdumps that indicate header version 3 may contain a malformed
kdump_sub_header structure with offset_vmcoreinfo and size_vmcoreinfo
fields offset by 4 bytes, and the actual vmcoreinfo data is not
preceded by its ELF note header and its "VMCOREINFO" string. This
workaround finds the vmcoreinfo data and patches the stored header's
offset_vmcoreinfo and size_vmcoreinfo values. Without the patch, the
"--osrelease dumpfile" command line option fails with the message
"crash: compressed kdump: cannot lseek dump vmcoreinfo", followed by
"unknown".
(anderson(a)redhat.com)
Luc Chouinard has come to the rescue and figured out what was going on.
Thanks a lot Luc!
It is not a matter of a "malformed" ARM compressed kdump
header, but rather
a result of using a 32-bit x86 crash binary created with "make target=ARM"
to analyze ARM compressed kdumps.
The ARM guys on the list can confirm this, but Luc debugged this issue
with a natively-built crash utility, and determined:
Seems like the off_t members of the kdump_sub_header struct are being
aligned on 8 byte boundaries. Which would explain the problem you are
pointing out. This can be a normal compiler behavior for the arm processor,
which will generate exceptions for unaligned memory accesses. This is
something we had to chase down and fix for some of our cross platform
code base (i386 and arm). The Arm experts may have to confirm, but I'd
think that all 'long long' members of structs may cause problem when
cross interpreted by a ARM crash.
Now AFAICT, I believe that the only "cross interpreted" items that would
come into play would be the kdump_sub_header:
struct kdump_sub_header {
unsigned long phys_base;
int dump_level; /* header_version 1 and later */
int split; /* header_version 2 and later */
unsigned long start_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
unsigned long end_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
off_t offset_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
unsigned long size_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
off_t offset_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
unsigned long size_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
off_t offset_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
unsigned long size_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
};
The header is originally created on the crashing ARM host, and written
by an ARM makedumpfile binary into the dumpfile header. But when crash
is build on an x86/x86_64 host with "make target=ARM", but resultant
binary is a 32-bit x86 binary:
$ make target=ARM
...
$ file crash
crash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses
shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32,
BuildID[sha1]=0x0459d34779357928839cd4d05f04517a441dc555, not stripped
And when compiled as an x86 binary, the structure's offsets would be:
struct kdump_sub_header {
[0] unsigned long phys_base;
[4] int dump_level; /* header_version 1 and later */
[8] int split; /* header_version 2 and later */
[12] unsigned long start_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
[16] unsigned long end_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
[20] off_t offset_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
[28] unsigned long size_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
[32] off_t offset_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
[40] unsigned long size_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
[44] off_t offset_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
[52] unsigned long size_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
};
But when compiled on an ARM processor, each 64-bit "off_t" would be pushed
up to an 8-byte boundary:
struct kdump_sub_header {
[0] unsigned long phys_base;
[4] int dump_level; /* header_version 1 and later */
[8] int split; /* header_version 2 and later */
[12] unsigned long start_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
[16] unsigned long end_pfn; /* header_version 2 and later */
[24] off_t offset_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
[32] unsigned long size_vmcoreinfo; /* header_version 3 and later */
[40] off_t offset_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
[48] unsigned long size_note; /* header_version 4 and later */
[56] off_t offset_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
[62] unsigned long size_eraseinfo; /* header_version 5 and later */
};
It just occured to me that we compile makedumpfile for ARM with following
flags:
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
-D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE
-D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
and looks like crash doesn't have such flags set. Do you think setting those
might help here?