[Crash-utility] [PATCH] crash: Support a dumpfile in the flattened format.

[Dave Allan]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 12:10:14PM -0500, Dave Anderson wrote:
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > Hi Dave,
> > 
> > makedumpfile command can create a dumpfile in the flattened format by -F
> > option, the format is useful for transporting the dump data by SSH.
> > 
> > But the crash utility could not read the dumpfile directly, so a user
> > should create a readable dumpfile by -R option of makedumpfile.
> > That was not userfriendly, and this patch is the solution for it.
> > 
> > If applying this patch to the crash utility, it can read a dumpfile in
> > the flattened format directly.
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Ken'ichi Ohmichi
> > 
> 
> Hi Ken'ichi,
> 
> I did make a few minor changes to your patch as written.
> 
> I renamed the multi-purpose read_dump_file() function to be
> read_flattened_format(), and only call it when the dumpfile 
> is a flat vmcore.  For clarification/maintainability, I prefer
> to keep the original lseek/read calls in diskdump.c and netdump.c
> as they were, mainly because it's not intuitive to have the 
> traditional netdump, kdump, and diskdump dumpfiles require an 
> access function that is located in the new makedumpfile.c.
> 
> I also fixed a couple compiler-warning issues, removed the
> change to file_elf_version(), which would never be called for
> a for a flat file because it's LKCD only, and added a simple
> makedumpfile header dump for "help -n".
> 
> But other than that, it's pretty much as you posted.
> 
> Again, I want to thank you for implementing this so quickly.
> This is an extremely useful feature.
> 
> Queued for the next release.

Thanks for the quick turnaround--that's excellent!

Dave