RE: [PATCH v2] x86_64, vmcoreinfo: Append 'page_offset_base' to vmcoreinfo

From: Kazuhito Hagio <k-hagio@ab.jp.nec.com>
To: Bhupesh Sharma <bhsharma@redhat.com>,
	"linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc: Boris Petkov <bp@alien8.de>, Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
	Dave Anderson <anderson@redhat.com>,
	James Morse <james.morse@arm.com>, Omar Sandoval <osandov@fb.com>,
	"x86@kernel.org" <x86@kernel.org>,
	"kexec@lists.infradead.org" <kexec@lists.infradead.org>,
	"linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org" 
	<linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>
Subject: RE: [PATCH v2] x86_64, vmcoreinfo: Append 'page_offset_base' to vmcoreinfo
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:07:27 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4AE2DC15AC0B8543882A74EA0D43DBEC03560F84@BPXM09GP.gisp.nec.co.jp> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1542318469-13699-1-git-send-email-bhsharma@redhat.com>

On 11/15/2018 4:47 PM, Bhupesh Sharma wrote:
> Adding 'page_offset_base' to the vmcoreinfo can be specially useful for
> live-debugging of a running kernel via user-space utilities
> like makedumpfile (see [1]).

I agree.

> Recently, I saw an issue with the 'makedumpfile' utility (see [2] for
> details), whose live debugging feature is broken with newer kernels
> (I tested the same with 4.19-rc8+ kernel), as KCORE_REMAP segments were
> added to kcore, thus leading to an additional sections in the same, and
> makedumpfile is not longer able to determine the start of direct
> mapping of all physical memory, as it relies on traversing the PT_LOAD
> segments inside kcore and using the last PT_LOAD segment
> to determine the start of direct mapping.

Actually, the KCORE_REMAP segments were already removed from kcore by
commit bf904d2762ee ("x86/pti/64: Remove the SYSCALL64 entry trampoline")
and kcore's program headers got back to the previous ones, but this
fact shows that they are changeable.

So I think that if we have this NUMBER(page_offset_base) in vmcoreinfo
for x86_64, user-space tools (especially makedumpfile) would become
more stable against changes in kcore and vmcore, rather than depending
on their PT_LOAD values.

Thanks,
Kazu