[Crash-utility] Scripting infrastructure in crash

[Sachin P. Sant]

Dave, i came across one of the Crash TODO list items about having
a scripting infrastructure in crash.

I was trying to evaluate the Alicia utility [mentioned in todo list].
Here are some of my observations about Alicia.

1] It is a wrapper on top of crash.
2] One can write perl based scripts to extract infromation from dumps.
3] It has a nice report generation functionality which presents
the data in text as well as html format.
4] Provides functions which could be used to read data from crash
dumps.
5] It is easy to use and effective too.

Attached here is a sample script which i tried using Alicia to 
display block and character devices. [ I know dev command already 
does this stuff .. but for the sake of trying out the Alicia i chose
to write such a script ]. 

Also encountered few problems while trying out Alicia.
1] On PPC64 arch came across data type overflow problem while
executing the attached script.
2] On s390/s390x architecture class function provided by Alicia
seems broken. 
3] Alicia is a wrapper on top of crash.

Other dump solutions [ lkcd ] has sial scripting which is c like
and very effective. Not sure how difficult it will be to implement
something like sial in crash.

Do you have any plans of having scripting infrastructure in 
crash ? If yes your thoughts on Alicia / sial / < any other stuff >

Regards
-Sachin


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