[Crash-utility] RFC: Improving crash's search speed

[Bob Montgomery]

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 21:50 +0000, Dave Anderson wrote:

> > 
> > The attached patch implements the -K option that is the same as doing
> > "-k -e <vmalloc_start_addr>".
> > 
> > Comments?
> > Bob Montgomery
> 
> I like the idea...
> 
> But it won't work on ia64 machines, where the vmalloc space is contained
> within the region starting at a000000000000000, which is below the unity-mapped
> region starting at e000000000000000.
...
> 
> So it looks like it might need a hack for ia64 anyway, which
> already has a few.  I don't think any of the other arches have
> their vmalloc regions below their unity-mapped regions.
> 
> Dave

So -K should really be defined as "search the identity-mapped region",
maybe?  Perhaps a mach-specific utility routine to return start and end
for that region which become the defaults for -K search??

My own tools are really "search physical pages", but I didn't see that
mechanism in crash (though it might be there?).

It's been a while since ia64 was my main architecture :-)

Bob Montgomery