[Crash-utility] Heads-up re: ppc64le support in crash-7.0.8

[Petr Tesarik]

On Thu, 04 Sep 2014 12:43:01 -0400
Dave Anderson <anderson at prospeed.net> wrote:

> Petr,
> 
> Are the sources different the openSUSE patches?

Dave,

I've just cheked it, and they haven't changed. So, we're talking about
crash-gdb-*.patch files from:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/Kernel:kdump/crash

I took these patches directly from our gdb package, which means they
should appear in a future gdb release, and then we'll get them for free
by upgrading the embedded gdb in crash.

Please also see my comments below.

> > Petr, Michel, et al,
> 
> Hi Dave et al.,
> 
> FWIW the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 release will ship a
> crash utility that works on ppc64le, and I think IBM has already tested
> it successfully. I'll see how I can make the latest sources available on
> a public site.
> 
> Petr Tesarik
> 
> > I'm currently working on adding ppc64le support for the next upstream
> > crash release.  I'm working from a Fedora bugzilla filed by Michel Normand,
> > where he that applied the "crash-gdb-7.6.series" set of patches from the openSUSE 
> > distribution.  Thanks Michel for doing the initial legwork using the Fedora
> > tree.
> > 
> > For the upstream crash utility repo, I do not want to carry the set of 9 patches
> > individually, but similar to the singular gdb-7.6.patch, I plan to concatenate
> > them into a singular gdb-7.6-ppc64le-support.patch.

Why? AFAICS it will only make rebasing to a different gdb version
harder.

> > Ideally the contents of the 9 patch files could be added to the gdb-7.6.patch,
> > and I may do that in the future.

I feel quite the opposite. The existing gdb-7.6.patch, which is always
such a pain to port when the gdb version changes, should be split up
into individual logical changes, and applied much like my 9 patches.

That way I can use quilt (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt) to
update the patch series when necesssary. I definitely find it easier to
update a number of smaller patches one by one than trying to update one
huge patch.

Just my two eurocents,
Petr Tesarik

> > However, just the crash-gdb-7.6-bound_minimal_symbol.patch in the 9-part set
> > is so large and intrusive (touching dozens of arch-neutral files) that
> > I am paranoid about breaking something, or altering behavior for the
> > other architectures.  So I plan to take a more cautious route for now,
> > and only apply the gdb-7.6-ppc64le-support.patch if the build host is
> > ppc64le.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> >   Dave