[Crash-utility] Re: crash enhancements proposal

[Dave Anderson]

Michael Holzheu wrote:

> 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
>

But like you also mentioned, there's the extra burden of
potentially having to save the swap partition contents
someplace?

That seems kind of ugly...

Dave


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