Re: [Crash-utility] Question for ARM developers/users w/respect to makedumpfile [PROBLEM SOLVED]

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.

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 */ };