[Crash-utility] Re: Xen Hypervisor analysis

Gentlemen, Our QA guys have started spending some time with Xen hypervisor crash analysis, and one obvious shortcoming is the implementation of the "search" command. I don't see how it ever could have worked correctly, but in its current state, it either causes segmentation violations, or quietly runs but doesn't find anything.

The primary problem is that the search command code is very linux-specific, and so the search command or command-options typically go off into the weeds trying to handle the addresses as linux virtual addresses. Here's what I plan to do for the Xen hypervisor search command: 1. Disallow the "-u" option, which is nonsensical. 2. Disallow the "-k" option, because of the various identity-mapped and virtual address ranges used by the various architectures is more than I care to deal with. 3. Do not translate the virtual addresses to physical before reading the memory, i.e., just keep the addresses virtual. 4. Require either a "-s <address>" starting address or a Xen hypervisor symbol as the starting address. 5. While cycling through memory, as soon as a page is encountered that cannot be read, the search will be stopped.

I'm hoping to get a new release out shortly, and you can see what I plan to do. If you guys have a desire to extend the capability beyond 1-5 above, send me patches. Thanks, Dave Anderson