[Crash-utility] crash 7.0.8 is available

[Dave Anderson]

Download from: http://people.redhat.com/anderson
                 or
               https://github.com/crash-utility/crash/releases

The master branch serves as a development branch that will contain all 
patches that are queued for the next release:

  $ git clone git://github.com/crash-utility/crash.git


Changelog:

 - Fix for the handling of 32-bit ELF xendump dumpfiles if the guest 
   was configured with more than 4GB of memory.  Without the patch, the
   crash session may fail during initialization with the error message 
   "crash: vmlinux and <dumpfile> do not match!".
   (dslutz at verizon.com)

 - Fix for file-handling errors when a compressed vmlinux.debug file 
   is followed by a vmlinux file on the crash command line.  When the 
   crash session ends, two errors will occur:
     (1) the vmlinux file will be deleted  
     (2) the temporary uncompressed version of the vmlinux.debug file
         will remain in /var/tmp
   This problem also occurs in the highly unlikely case where a 
   compressed vmlinux file is followed by a vmlinux.debug file on the
   command line, and the uncompressed temporary version of the vmlinux
   file is larger than the vmlinux.debug file.  In that case:
     (1) the vmlinux.debug file will be deleted
     (2) the temporary uncompressed version of the vmlinux file
         will remain in /var/tmp
   (dmair at suse.com)     

 - Fix for the "search -t" option if the system has 2064 or more tasks.
   Without the patch, the command fails with a dump of the crash utility
   memory allocation statistics, ending with "search: cannot allocate 
   any more memory!".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix for the "mod -S" command to find the debuginfo data for Red Hat
   "kpatch" modules.  Without the patch, the command would display
   "mod: cannot find or load object file for <kpatch-module> module".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Deprecated the "mount -f" option for Linux 3.13 and later kernels
   containing commit eee5cc2702929fd41cce28058dc6d6717f723f87, which
   removed the super_block.s_files list_head member and the open files
   list that it contained.  Without the patch, the command option fails
   with the error message "mount: invalid structure member offset: 
   super_block_s_files"
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - If a compressed kdump is damaged/truncated such that the bitmap data
   in the dumpfile header is not contained within the file, attempts
   to analyze it with a vmlinux file, or using the "crash --osrelease"
   or "crash --log" options with just the vmcore, will result in the 
   crash utility spinning forever, endlessly performing reads of 0 bytes
   from the file without recognizing the EOF condition.
   (dwysocha at redhat.com)

 - Fix for an ARM64 compilation failure of the embedded gdb file
   "aarch-linux-nat.c" in the Fedora fc21 rawhide environment, which 
   uses glibc-headers-2.19.90-24.fc21. 
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Document the reason behind the deprecation of the "mount -f" option
   for Linux 3.13 and later kernels if the option is attempted, and in 
   the "help mount" output, similar to the deprecated "mount -d" option.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - During initialization, reject useless ARM64 "(A)" absolute symbols 
   that begin with "__crc_".  Without the patch, several thousand of
   them may be displayed by "sym -l" prior to the first kernel virtual
   address symbol.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - When running against an ARM64 dumpfile created with the "snap.so" 
   extension module, do not attempt to read the crash_notes.  Since the
   dumpfile was taken while running on a live system, the crash_notes, 
   if configured into the kernel, would not contain valid data.  Without
   the patch, the message "WARNING: could not retrieve crash_notes" is
   displayed during session initialization.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Determine the various ARM64 kernel virtual address ranges using the 
   kernel's VA_BITS value.  It currently is hardwired in the kernel to
   one of two values depending upon whether 4K or 64K pages are 
   configured.  However, there are plans to support 16K paqes, to make 
   VA_BITS a configurable value, and to make the number of page-table
   levels configurable.  Towards that end, the crash utility has been
   changed to determine the VA_BITS value based upon known kernel
   virtual addresses, and to then calculate the relevant kernel virtual
   address ranges on that value instead of hardwiring them based upon
   the page size.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Enhancement to the "kmem -S" option for Linux 3.2 and later kernels
   configured with CONFIG_SLUB to display the address of each per-cpu
   kmem_cache_cpu address and the contents of its per-cpu partial list.
   (qiaonuohan at cn.fujitsu.com)

 - If an ARM or ARM64 dumpfile does not contain the register sets of
   the active tasks in the kernel's per-cpu crash_notes, there is an
   initialization-time warning message indicating "could not retrieve 
   crash_notes".  It has been changed to a more meaningful warning
   message indicating "cannot retrieve registers for active tasks".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Implement support for ARM and ARM64 raw RAM dumpfiles.  One or
   more "ramdump" files may be entered on the crash command line
   in an ordered pair format consisting of the RAM dump filename
   and the starting physical address expressed in hexadecimal,
   connected with an ampersand:

     $ crash vmlinux ramdump at address [ramdump at address]

   A temporary ELF header will be created in /var/tmp, and the
   combination of the header and the ramdump file(s) will be handled
   like a normal ELF vmcore.  The ELF header will only exist during
   the crash session.  If desired, an optional "-o <filename>" 
   may be entered to create a permanent ELF vmcore file from the 
   ramdump file(s).  
   (vinayakm.list at gmail.com, paawan1982 at yahoo.com, anderson at redhat.com)

 - Fix for the "help -[nD]" ELF header translation to recognize the 
   EM_ARM and EM_AARCH values as "e_machine" types, and ELFOSABI_LINUX
   as an "e_ident[EI_OSABI]" type.  Without the patch, the e_machine 
   translation would show "40 (unsupported)" for 32-bit ARM, or 
   "183 (unsupported)" on ARM64; and the ELFOSABI_LINUX type would
   be translated as "3 (?)".
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Re-run a command in the history list by entering an "!" followed by 
   the number identifying the command.  However, unlike the similar "r"
   pseudo-command, if the number is a command name in the user's PATH,
   maintain the current behavior and execute that command.
   (anderson at redhat.com)
 
 - Fix to recognize that the live system "crash.ko" memory driver may
   be compressed and named "crash.ko.xz".  Without the patch, the driver
   is not recognized and loaded, and as a result the /dev/mem driver  
   and/or /proc/kcore will be tried as the live memory source.
   (anderson at redhat.com)
 
 - On a live system during session initialization, delay the first read
   error message (typically when reading the "cpu_possible_mask") until
   it is confirmed that all of the following are true:
     (1) /dev/crash does not exist, and
     (2) /dev/mem is restricted via CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM, and 
     (3) /proc/kcore cannot be read/accessed.
   The "kernel may be configured with CONFIG_STRICT_DEVMEM" and
   the "trying /proc/kcore as an alternative" messages will still
   be displayed when appropriate.  The read error message be displayed
   only if all three live memory read options fail.
   (anderson at redhat.com)
 
 - Fortify the validity verification of the data structures traversed 
   by the "kmem [-sS]" options for kernels configured with CONFIG_SLUB.
   Without the patch, the contents of several structure members are not
   validated, and may generate bogus or never-ending output, typically 
   seen when running the commands on a "live dump" where the dumpfile 
   was taken while the kernel was still running.  The patch aborts the 
   relevant parts of per-kmem_cache output when invalid data is 
   encountered or if an object list contains duplicate entries, and
   error messages have been enhanced to more accurately describe the 
   issues encountered.
   (anderson at redhat.com)

 - Implement support for the ppc64le PPC64 little-endian architecture.
   Since this required a large number of patches to be applied to
   architecture-neutral files in the gdb-7.6 tree, the changes are 
   only applied if the host build system is a ppc64le.
   (ptesarik at suse.cz, normand at linux.vnet.ibm.com)

 - Fix for SMP active task register-gathering from "kvmdump" dumpfiles 
   that were created with a cpu version id of 12 or greater that contain 
   additional XSAVE related fields in their cpu device headers.  Without
   the patch, active tasks running on cpus above 0 may have truncated 
   backtraces.
   (uobergfe at redhat.com)

 - Maintain backwards-compatibility for "kvmdump" dumpfiles that were
   created by older development versions of KVM tools in which the
   cpu version id was 12, but the cpu device headers did not contain 
   the additional XSAVE related fields. 
   (uobergfe at redhat.com)

 - Address a "ps" command performance degradation that was introduced by
   a crash-7.0.4 patch which added per-thread task_struct.rss_stat page
   counts to the task's mm_struct.rss_stat page counts in order to show
   an accurate/synchronized RSS value.  Without the patch, the "ps"
   command performance would degrade as the number of tasks increased, 
   most notably when there were thousands of tasks. 
   (panfy.fnst at cn.fujitsu.com, anderson at redhat.com)