[Crash-utility] crash version 4.0-4.7 is available

Dave Anderson anderson at redhat.com
Tue Sep 25 19:58:50 UTC 2007


- Incorporation of Luc Chouinard's SIAL interpreter (Simple Image
   Access Language) as a crash extension module.  When loaded with
   the "extend" command, the sial.so module provides three commands,
   "load" to load a SIAL script, "unload" to unload it, and "edit",
   which unloads the script, brings up an $EDITOR-based edit session
   of the script, and then loads it again.  Also, when the sial.so
   module is loaded, it will automatically load any SIAL scripts
   found in the /usr/share/sial/crash or $HOME/.sial directories.
   Therefore, by putting "extend <path-to>/sial.so" in either
   ./.crashrc or $HOME/.crashrc, all desired SIAL scripts may be
   loaded on a particular machine in a hands-off manner.  For details,
   consult the README and README.sial files in the extensions/libsial
   subdirectory.  (lucchouina at yahoo.com)

- Removed hardwired-dependencies in the top-level and extensions
   subdirectory Makefiles for building extension modules.   Now it is
   possible to copy an extension module's .c file into the extensions
   subdirectory, and enter "make extensions" from the top-level to build
   it.  If the build of the module requires special handling, a .mk
   makefile with the same prefix as the .c file may be provided, and
   and it will be automatically used to build it.
   (jmoyer at redhat.com, anderson at redhat.com)

- When a 32-bit x86 xenU guest is run on an x86_64 dom0 host, the
   new-style xen ELF format dumpfile contains an ELF header with an
   e_machine type of EM_X86_64 (instead of EM_386).  This was getting
   gets rejected with the error message "crash: vmcore: not a supported
   file format".  The fix simply acceptes the e_machine type mismatch,
   since the new-style ELF format dumpfiles are 64-bit by default.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

- Enhanced the "kmem <address>" option to also search for task_struct
   and kernel stack addresses, and report them with the "set" output.
   Also, fix for when "kmem <vmalloc-address>" was entered, the header
   for the mem_map data was not displayed.  (anderson at redhat.com)

- Fix for determining starting rip/rsp backtrace hooks for the panic
   task in x86_64 xen dom0 kdumps; newer kernels have replaced the
   call to "xen_machine_kexec" with "machine_kexec", and without this
   patch may display back-traces with missing frames.  Also on x86_64
   non-xen kdump panic task backtraces, it is possible that the wrong
   stack instance of "crash_kexec" is used as the starting hook, which
   may also lead to missing frames.  (anderson at redhat.com)

- Fix for ia64 LKCD dumpfiles where it is not possible to read the task
   structure of the task that follows a task which is in the task address
   "fixup list", and zeroes are returned instead.  (atyson at hp.com)

- Fix for potential "mod -[sS]" failures with modules whose object
   files contain an unusually large number of sections; module
   loading attempts may issue a "<segmentation violation in gdb>"
   message followed by the error message: "mod: [module name]: gdb
   add-symbol-file command failed".
   (carl.hsieh at teradata.com, anderson at redhat.com)

- Fix to prevent dumpfile reads beyond EOF when reading new (optimized)
   xen ELF core xendumps.  Without the patch, error messages of the sort:
   "crash: cannot read index page [number]" may occur during session
   initialization, with unpredictable run-time results.
   (yamahata at valinux.co.jp)

- In x86_xen_kdump_p2m_create(), the same variable was being used as
   the for-loop index in both an outer and an embedded inner for-loop.
   As a result, if debug level was equal to or larger than 7, the outer
   for-loop was repeated only once.  (nishimura at mxp.nes.nec.co.jp)

Download from: http://people.redhat.com/anderson




More information about the Crash-utility mailing list