[Crash-utility] PATCH 00/10] teach crash to work with "live" ramdump

[Dave Anderson]

----- Original Message -----
> On 04/25, Dave Anderson wrote:
> >
> > As I see it, this facility is simply another LIVE_SYSTEM memory source,
> > of which there currently are /dev/mem, /proc/kcore and /dev/crash.
> 
> Yes, if we are talking about 09/10 and 10/10.
> 
> > The
> > essential difference between them is the pc->readmem plugin:
> 
> The essential difference is that this source is remote. See another email.
> 
> > The CRASHBUILTIN stuff and related stuff you ran into is only there because
> > live system analysis typically does not require a crash command line option,
> > so crash has to figure what to do when a user just enters "crash".
> 
> Ah. Yes, the usage of CRASHBUILTIN is ugly, and I tried to document this.
> 
> We need the new (say) RAW_MEM_DUMP flag. We can't use RAMDUMP because it can
> be set along with KDUMP.
> 
> And there is no room in pc->flags, so I decided to abuse CRASHBUILTIN for now.

I understand.
 
It's exceeding rare that a new dumpfile type, or a new live system accessor in
this case, gets introduced.  When that happens, we can move deprecated leftovers
from pc->flags to pc->flags2.   So for example, all of these can be moved to
pc->flags2 in one fell swoop:

  REM_NETDUMP
  REM_MCLXCD
  REM_LKCD
  REM_S390D

Checking everywhere they get used, the (useless) settings in remote.c can be 
changed, and the very few macros that reference them can be changed to get
them from pc->flags2.

Dave