[Crash-utility] how to generate xen hypervisor core though kdump or other way?

[Daniel Kiper]

Hi Dave,

[...]

> That has always been the case -- at least up until the most
> recent version of Xen (3.1-era) that Red Hat supported -- where
> a kdump vmcore that is taken on the dom0 host can be analyzed
> either from the viewpoint of the dom0 vmlinux kernel or from the
> viewpoint of the xen-syms hypervisor.  And for that matter, given
> that it's a dump of all physical memory, you can also analyze any
> of the guest vmlinux kernels if you know what the value of the
> pfn_to_mfn_list_list pfn is:
>
> $ crash -h
> ...
>
>  --p2m_mfn pfn
>     When a Xen Hypervisor or its dom0 kernel crashes, the dumpfile
>     is typically analyzed with either the Xen hypervisor or the dom0
>     kernel.  It is also possible to analyze any of the guest domU
>     kernels if the pfn_to_mfn_list_list pfn value of the guest kernel
>     is passed on the command line along with its NAMELIST and the
>     dumpfile.

To be honest I have never not attempted to use this option.
I was focusing on Xen dump analysis only. It looks that
it is time to do that now.

> So anyway, Hu shows that the vmlinux/vmcore pair works OK, but
> the xen-syms/vmcore pair is not working with his more recent
> version of Xen (4.1.3).  I would have thought that your recent
> patch set would have addressed his Xen version?

It did. I suppose that there is an issue with finding
dom0 image in crash dump. Probably I will investigate
it further in 2-3 weeks.

> On the other hand, I cannot confirm whether SLES does something
> differently such that their Xen hypervisor is patched to such a
> degree that it doesn't work with crash-6.1.0?

As above.

Daniel