[Crash-utility] [ANNOUNCE] crash version 6.0.4 is available

[Dave Anderson]

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

Changelog:

 - Fix to allow the recently-added "mod -g" and "mod -r" options to be 
   used together.  Without the patch, if both options were used, the
   command would fail with a "mod: invalid option" error complaining
   about one or the other option letter.
   (bob.montgomery at hp.com)

 - Additional update for 3.1.x and later kernels configured with 
   CONFIG_SLAB, which have replaced the kmem_cache.nodelists[] array 
   with a pointer to an outside array.  Without the patch, depending
   upon a system's cpu configuration and actual cpu count, the crash 
   session may display "crash: unable to initialize kmem slab cache 
   subsystem" during invocation, or if it does succeed, "kmem -s" may 
   generate a segmentation violation.
   (bob.montgomery at hp.com, anderson at redhat.com)

 - Document the "crash [-h|--help] all" option in the crash.8 man 
   page and in the "crash [-h|--help]" output.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix the S390/S390X-specific "s390dbf" command's "hex_ascii" debug 
   data printing routine to prevent the display of non-ASCII characters.
   (holzheu at linux.vnet.ibm.com)

 - Fix for ARM stack unwinding on 3.2 and later kernels due to commit:
   http://git.kernel.org/linus/de66a979012dbc66b1ec0125795a3f79ee667b8a
   (rabin at rab.in)

 - Implemented a new "search -x <count>" option that displays the
   memory contents before and after any found search target.  The
   before and after memory context will consist of "count" memory items 
   of the same size as the searched-for value.  This option is not 
   applicable with the -c option.
   (zhangyanfei at cn.fujitsu.com)

 - Fix for the x86_64 Xen hypervisor "bt" command.  Without the patch,
   the contents of the RDX register in exception frames incorrectly
   shows the contents of the RCX register.         
   (s.ikarashi at jp.fujitsu.com)

 - Implementation of a platform-based vmalloc address translation scheme
   for the 32-bit PPC architecture, introducing suppport for the PPC44X 
   platform while maintaining the current default platform.  Related to
   that, the PTE translation function used by "vtop" properly handles 
   platforms that use 64-bit PTEs, and the "mach" command displays the 
   kernel's "powerpc_base_platform" name string.
   (suzuki at in.ibm.com)  

 - Fix for the usage of native gdb commands where the command output is
   redirected to a pipe and then redirected to a file.  Without the 
   patch, a command construct such as:

     crash> gdb-command | shell-command > output-file

   would cause the embedded gdb module to fail with the error message
   "gdb: gdb request failed: gdb-command | shell-command".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix to prevent a crash session that is run over a network connection
   that is killed/removed from going into 100% cpu-time loop.  The fix
   that went into crash-5.0.2 to handle the change in behavior of the
   built-in readline() library call does not suffice in cases where 
   readline() never gets a chance to be called.  Accordingly, the crash 
   session is now initialized with a PR_SET_PDEATHSIG prctl setting,
   which will cleanly kill itself upon its parent's death.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix for the support of PPC64 compressed kdumps, a regression that
   was introduced in crash-6.0.3 when support for 32-bit PPC compressed
   kdumps was implemented.  Without the patch, the crash session
   fails to initialize, showing this warning message:

     WARNING: machine type mismatch:
                crash utility: PPC64
                vmcore: PPC

   followed by the error: "crash: vmcore: not a supported file format".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix for the x86_64 "bt" command to prevent the possible skipping
   of the stack frame just above an exception frame that indicates
   "[exception RIP: unknown or invalid address]".  This highly-unlikely
   event could occur if the kernel jumps to a bogus text location and 
   attempts to execute it, or if the exception occurs in vmalloc space
   that was allocated with module_alloc() by a systemtap kprobe-handler, 
   and therefore has no symbolic reference.
   (anderson at redhat.com)