Robert Watson
2008-Mar-24 12:28 UTC
FYI: textdump MFC to RELENG_7 over the next week or two
Dear 7-stable users:
After settling for three months in 8-current, I'm going to begin MFC'ing
support for textdumps from HEAD to RELENG_7 over the next week or two.
Textdumps come in a number of parts, each of which will be merged followed by
a day or two of settling time: DDB output capture, DDB scripting, and then
finally textdump support itself, which also requires changes to savecore(8).
Once the MFC is done, I'll forward out the textdump Q&A I sent to
current@ a
few months ago which gives some ideas for how to use the various parts, which
can be combined to give textdump support, or used separately for other sorts
of debugging. Hands to help update the kernel debugging section of the
handbook to include information on textdumps, not to mention other
improvements in kernel debugging in the last few years, would be most welcome.
I've received some requests to MFC textdumps to RELENG_6. Once support is
fully merged to RELENG_7, I'll wait a bit and then look at how difficult to
do
that would be. My guess is that it will be relatively straight forward and as
such will follow a month or so later.
Thanks,
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:10:46 +0000 (GMT)
From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To: arch@FreeBSD.org
Cc: current@FreeBSD.org
Subject: DDB scripting, output capture, and textdumps
Dear all:
I've been hacking on-and-off for a while on a side project to improve our
kernel debugging facilities. Primarily, my concern has been to address three
problems:
- The complications of employing kernel core dumps for debugging,
including the large size of dumps making them unwieldy to distribute or
store for any extended period (even with minidumps), the requirement to
have relatively synchronized kernel source in order to use the dumps,
the need to have a kernel with debugging symbols, and the problems with
fsck causing sufficient swap use to invalidate dumps before they can be
extracted.
- The decreasing likelihood that notebooks will ship with serial ports
that can be used for interactive debugging using DDB. Making end-users
type in stack traces is cruel, photos are a pain, and X11 rules out
both.
- The fact that a great many problems are most easily diagnosed using
utility routines present in DDB, but not as easily using kgdb for
offline analysis. I find that for many bugs I analyze, simply looking
at the DDB output is sufficient to identify the source of the problem.
An idea I punted around a bit at BSDCan earlier this year (or perhaps it was at
EuroBSDCon the previous year) was an idea of a "textdump" -- that is,
a new
type of kernel dump based on capturing automatically extracted debugging
information generated by DDB. The result would be an ASCII text file that
could be filed as a bug report, perhaps even automatically.
To this end, I have implemented three new facilities for use with DDB:
(1) DDB output capture. The output of DDB is stored in a memory buffer,
and can be extracted using a sysctl or textdumps (see below). This
can be turned on and off, both for use manually ("I'll want this
later, but not that") and as part of scripts (see below).
(2) DDB scripting. A limited number of named scripts can be defined to
run a series of DDB commands. No loops, etc, just simple command
lists. These can be caused to run automatically on entering DDB for
various scenarios, including WITNESS violations and kernel panics.
They can also be run by hand in order to save a bit of typing if you
use DDB in a repetitive way (as I do).
(3) Textdumps. A new dump type that stores a series of data files
containing various pieces of information, including the DDB capture
buffer, kernel message buffer, kernel configuration (if compiled into
the kernel), panic message, and kernel version string. These are
stored in the ustar format inside the dump partition (aligned to the
end) so can be easily extended, and savecore(8) requires almost no new
logic to deal with them (it just drops numbered tar files in
/var/crash). This makes it straight forward to extend the textdump format
to include new types of information and avoids the issue of how to safely
simultaneously represent information in many different formats in the same
file.
These are pretty flexible tools, and you can imagine doing the following sorts
of things:
- Setting the kdb.enter.panic script to automatically turn on output
capture, do full backtraces of all threads, show open file information,
dump UMA stats, and save it all to a textdump and then reboot.
- Setting the kdb.enter.witness script to show lock information, generate
a coredump, and reboot. Or, just to automatically do "show
allocks" and
drop to the DDB prompt.
- Adding a flag to rc.conf to automatically submit textdumps via e-mail to
a specific address, perhaps including GNATS or an automated bug system.
These could be unpacked and automatically analyzed, and do to the compact
size, kept for long-term trend analysis or to identify when a problem
started occuring.
I've produced an initial snapshot of the above, which can be found here:
http://www.watson.org/~robert/freebsd/20071218-ddb.tgz
This adds three files to DDB, patches quite a few kernel files (to pass more
information into KDB about why it's being entered, in order to trigger the
right script), enhancements to savecore(8) to know how to extract textdumps,
adds a ddb(8) command line tool so that userspace can manage DDB scripts from
outside the debugger, extensions to the ddb(4) man
page, and a new textdump(4) man page.
There are a number of known limitations; I've tried to document them at the
top
of the pertinent files where I am aware of them. I also regret to say that to
date I've been able to test only on i386, and not other platforms. I'd
welcome
any feedback -- I'd like to get these changes into CVS in the next week or
two.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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