[Crash-utility] Re: crash enhancements proposal

[Michael Holzheu]

Hi Dave,

>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

> > DESCRIPTION:
> >      User space enhancements
> >      - show user space stack backtrace, if present in the dump file,
> >      - ability to link user space namelist (debug object files),
> >
> > RESOLUTION STATUS: TBD
> >
>
> I thought crash was a kernel [crash/live-system] analyzer?
>
> You currently can add user-space debug data with "add-symbol-file",
> which loads the debug data and symbols into gdb.  I have done this
> kind of thing, but it's been an "almost-never" kind of situation, where
> I've wanted to display a user program's data structure.
>
> But if you want to start throwing in this kind of user-space stuff,
> please just keep it segregated.

I also always thought that it is not necessary to debug
userspace stuff in crash dumps. Some weeks ago, we
had a customer, who had some complex software setup
which did not work as expected. The customer was so
frustrated that he took an s390 standalone dump and
sent it to our service organization.

There they used the lcrash core command to extract
the elf cores for all the userspace programs. At least
it was possible to get the userspace stackbacktraces for
the processes, which gave the service team some
information about the state of the complex software
setup....

So I think for very complex installations, there are
cases, where it makes sense to just snapshot the
whole system with a crash dump.

But I still think, it is best to just add an elf core command
to crash and do the rest of user space debugging with gdb...

Michael