[Crash-utility] Re: crash enhancements proposal

[Rainer Bawidamann]

Time for me to speak up I guess ...

> On Mon, 2006-05-08 10:58:39, Dave Anderson wrote:
> > I know I'm setting myself up for flames here, but why not use NFS? 
Prior
> > to writing this, I was just looking at an x86_64 vmcore file stored 
on,
> > and NFS-mounted from, an x86 netdump server, and have done that many
> > times.
> 
> That strategy is helpful but for my team not as useful as you might
> think. We only have one production server in our lab. It is an x86 
system
> with eight CPUs and 8 GiB of memory. Everything else in our lab is used
> for problem reproduction. So you never know exactly what state they're
> in. And most of the lab systems have only 1 GiB of memory which makes
> analyzing large dumps an exercise in thrashing the disks. Our little 
s390
> system doesn't even have that much memory assigned to each LPAR. Also,
> we haven't been able to convince management to spend the money to 
upgrade
> our lab infrastructure. So we're limited to 100 Mbps ethernet between
> most of the systems.

We're on the other side of the range: embedded system with <64MB of Ram, 
no disk, just flash, not that fast. You don't want to run crash there.

OTOH every laptop is fast and big enough for crash with these dumps so we 
debug our dumps on Thinkpads.

Of course we could use crash native on any other Linux-PPC32 system, but 
the faster PPCs are 64bit and that's already cross-platform.

> Dave, have you heard from rainer.bawidamann at de.ibm.com? He's leading an
> effort to create a cross-arch capable version of crash. Last I heard the
> current implementation only supports host=x86/target=ppc32.

That's right, but the patch is ugly and very intrusive, you won't like it. 
And it might be difficult to get x64/s390 eg. as some kernel headers from 
the target are needed for compiling crash. I plan to make the patch 
cleaner and less intrusive, but people keep putting other things on my 
plan. And I need to resolve some other tasks before I can send patches, so 
don't hold your breath.

Regards,
Rainer