[Crash-utility] Scripting infrastructure in crash

[Alex Sidorenko]

On May 2, 2007 09:36:44 am Sachin P. Sant wrote:
> 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.

Hi Sachin,

I am developing a set of Python-bindings (plus scripts) that we are using in 
HP,

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pykdump

To compare with Alicia:


> 1] It is a wrapper on top of crash.

Pykdump is an extension written in C for time-critical access plus a set of 
Python libraries/scripts. Faster than Alicia 10-100 times :-)

> 2] One can write perl based scripts to extract infromation from dumps.

The same - I am mainly working on 'xportshow.py' - printing nicely various 
tables/structures, mostly IPv6 aware. Routing tables, TCP/UDP/IP connections 
analysis, ARP-cache, Netfilter, devpack and so on.

> 3] It has a nice report generation functionality which presents
> the data in text as well as html format.

Not done yet.

> 4] Provides functions which could be used to read data from crash
> dumps.

The same

> 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.

Python API ('Pykdump') at this moment works only on i686/AMD64/IA64 only. The 
porting to other platforms should be trivial but I just did not look at this.


> 3] Alicia is a wrapper on top of crash.

Pykdump can both drive crash externally (via 'pexpect' Python module) or run 
as an extension from inside 'crash' session, e.g.

crash64> epython xportshow.py --summary

> 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,
Alex


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Alexandre Sidorenko             email: alexs at hplinux.canada.hp.com
Global Solutions Engineering:   Unix Networking
Hewlett-Packard (Canada)
------------------------------------------------------------------