forked from luck/tmp_suning_uos_patched
71e3aac072
Lately I've been working to make KVM use hugepages transparently without
the usual restrictions of hugetlbfs. Some of the restrictions I'd like to
see removed:
1) hugepages have to be swappable or the guest physical memory remains
locked in RAM and can't be paged out to swap
2) if a hugepage allocation fails, regular pages should be allocated
instead and mixed in the same vma without any failure and without
userland noticing
3) if some task quits and more hugepages become available in the
buddy, guest physical memory backed by regular pages should be
relocated on hugepages automatically in regions under
madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) (ideally event driven by waking up the
kernel deamon if the order=HPAGE_PMD_SHIFT-PAGE_SHIFT list becomes
not null)
4) avoidance of reservation and maximization of use of hugepages whenever
possible. Reservation (needed to avoid runtime fatal faliures) may be ok for
1 machine with 1 database with 1 database cache with 1 database cache size
known at boot time. It's definitely not feasible with a virtualization
hypervisor usage like RHEV-H that runs an unknown number of virtual machines
with an unknown size of each virtual machine with an unknown amount of
pagecache that could be potentially useful in the host for guest not using
O_DIRECT (aka cache=off).
hugepages in the virtualization hypervisor (and also in the guest!) are
much more important than in a regular host not using virtualization,
becasue with NPT/EPT they decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 24
to 19 in case only the hypervisor uses transparent hugepages, and they
decrease the tlb-miss cacheline accesses from 19 to 15 in case both the
linux hypervisor and the linux guest both uses this patch (though the
guest will limit the addition speedup to anonymous regions only for
now...). Even more important is that the tlb miss handler is much slower
on a NPT/EPT guest than for a regular shadow paging or no-virtualization
scenario. So maximizing the amount of virtual memory cached by the TLB
pays off significantly more with NPT/EPT than without (even if there would
be no significant speedup in the tlb-miss runtime).
The first (and more tedious) part of this work requires allowing the VM to
handle anonymous hugepages mixed with regular pages transparently on
regular anonymous vmas. This is what this patch tries to achieve in the
least intrusive possible way. We want hugepages and hugetlb to be used in
a way so that all applications can benefit without changes (as usual we
leverage the KVM virtualization design: by improving the Linux VM at
large, KVM gets the performance boost too).
The most important design choice is: always fallback to 4k allocation if
the hugepage allocation fails! This is the _very_ opposite of some large
pagecache patches that failed with -EIO back then if a 64k (or similar)
allocation failed...
Second important decision (to reduce the impact of the feature on the
existing pagetable handling code) is that at any time we can split an
hugepage into 512 regular pages and it has to be done with an operation
that can't fail. This way the reliability of the swapping isn't decreased
(no need to allocate memory when we are short on memory to swap) and it's
trivial to plug a split_huge_page* one-liner where needed without
polluting the VM. Over time we can teach mprotect, mremap and friends to
handle pmd_trans_huge natively without calling split_huge_page*. The fact
it can't fail isn't just for swap: if split_huge_page would return -ENOMEM
(instead of the current void) we'd need to rollback the mprotect from the
middle of it (ideally including undoing the split_vma) which would be a
big change and in the very wrong direction (it'd likely be simpler not to
call split_huge_page at all and to teach mprotect and friends to handle
hugepages instead of rolling them back from the middle). In short the
very value of split_huge_page is that it can't fail.
The collapsing and madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) part will remain separated and
incremental and it'll just be an "harmless" addition later if this initial
part is agreed upon. It also should be noted that locking-wise replacing
regular pages with hugepages is going to be very easy if compared to what
I'm doing below in split_huge_page, as it will only happen when
page_count(page) matches page_mapcount(page) if we can take the PG_lock
and mmap_sem in write mode. collapse_huge_page will be a "best effort"
that (unlike split_huge_page) can fail at the minimal sign of trouble and
we can try again later. collapse_huge_page will be similar to how KSM
works and the madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) will work similar to
madvise(MADV_MERGEABLE).
The default I like is that transparent hugepages are used at page fault
time. This can be changed with
/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled. The control knob can be set
to three values "always", "madvise", "never" which mean respectively that
hugepages are always used, or only inside madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE) regions,
or never used. /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/defrag instead
controls if the hugepage allocation should defrag memory aggressively
"always", only inside "madvise" regions, or "never".
The pmd_trans_splitting/pmd_trans_huge locking is very solid. The
put_page (from get_user_page users that can't use mmu notifier like
O_DIRECT) that runs against a __split_huge_page_refcount instead was a
pain to serialize in a way that would result always in a coherent page
count for both tail and head. I think my locking solution with a
compound_lock taken only after the page_first is valid and is still a
PageHead should be safe but it surely needs review from SMP race point of
view. In short there is no current existing way to serialize the O_DIRECT
final put_page against split_huge_page_refcount so I had to invent a new
one (O_DIRECT loses knowledge on the mapping status by the time gup_fast
returns so...). And I didn't want to impact all gup/gup_fast users for
now, maybe if we change the gup interface substantially we can avoid this
locking, I admit I didn't think too much about it because changing the gup
unpinning interface would be invasive.
If we ignored O_DIRECT we could stick to the existing compound refcounting
code, by simply adding a get_user_pages_fast_flags(foll_flags) where KVM
(and any other mmu notifier user) would call it without FOLL_GET (and if
FOLL_GET isn't set we'd just BUG_ON if nobody registered itself in the
current task mmu notifier list yet). But O_DIRECT is fundamental for
decent performance of virtualized I/O on fast storage so we can't avoid it
to solve the race of put_page against split_huge_page_refcount to achieve
a complete hugepage feature for KVM.
Swap and oom works fine (well just like with regular pages ;). MMU
notifier is handled transparently too, with the exception of the young bit
on the pmd, that didn't have a range check but I think KVM will be fine
because the whole point of hugepages is that EPT/NPT will also use a huge
pmd when they notice gup returns pages with PageCompound set, so they
won't care of a range and there's just the pmd young bit to check in that
case.
NOTE: in some cases if the L2 cache is small, this may slowdown and waste
memory during COWs because 4M of memory are accessed in a single fault
instead of 8k (the payoff is that after COW the program can run faster).
So we might want to switch the copy_huge_page (and clear_huge_page too) to
not temporal stores. I also extensively researched ways to avoid this
cache trashing with a full prefault logic that would cow in 8k/16k/32k/64k
up to 1M (I can send those patches that fully implemented prefault) but I
concluded they're not worth it and they add an huge additional complexity
and they remove all tlb benefits until the full hugepage has been faulted
in, to save a little bit of memory and some cache during app startup, but
they still don't improve substantially the cache-trashing during startup
if the prefault happens in >4k chunks. One reason is that those 4k pte
entries copied are still mapped on a perfectly cache-colored hugepage, so
the trashing is the worst one can generate in those copies (cow of 4k page
copies aren't so well colored so they trashes less, but again this results
in software running faster after the page fault). Those prefault patches
allowed things like a pte where post-cow pages were local 4k regular anon
pages and the not-yet-cowed pte entries were pointing in the middle of
some hugepage mapped read-only. If it doesn't payoff substantially with
todays hardware it will payoff even less in the future with larger l2
caches, and the prefault logic would blot the VM a lot. If one is
emebdded transparent_hugepage can be disabled during boot with sysfs or
with the boot commandline parameter transparent_hugepage=0 (or
transparent_hugepage=2 to restrict hugepages inside madvise regions) that
will ensure not a single hugepage is allocated at boot time. It is simple
enough to just disable transparent hugepage globally and let transparent
hugepages be allocated selectively by applications in the MADV_HUGEPAGE
region (both at page fault time, and if enabled with the
collapse_huge_page too through the kernel daemon).
This patch supports only hugepages mapped in the pmd, archs that have
smaller hugepages will not fit in this patch alone. Also some archs like
power have certain tlb limits that prevents mixing different page size in
the same regions so they will not fit in this framework that requires
"graceful fallback" to basic PAGE_SIZE in case of physical memory
fragmentation. hugetlbfs remains a perfect fit for those because its
software limits happen to match the hardware limits. hugetlbfs also
remains a perfect fit for hugepage sizes like 1GByte that cannot be hoped
to be found not fragmented after a certain system uptime and that would be
very expensive to defragment with relocation, so requiring reservation.
hugetlbfs is the "reservation way", the point of transparent hugepages is
not to have any reservation at all and maximizing the use of cache and
hugepages at all times automatically.
Some performance result:
vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largep
ages3
memset page fault 1566023
memset tlb miss 453854
memset second tlb miss 453321
random access tlb miss 41635
random access second tlb miss 41658
vmx andrea # LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so HUGETLB_MORECORE=yes HUGETLB_PATH=/mnt/huge/ ./largepages3
memset page fault 1566471
memset tlb miss 453375
memset second tlb miss 453320
random access tlb miss 41636
random access second tlb miss 41637
vmx andrea # ./largepages3
memset page fault 1566642
memset tlb miss 453417
memset second tlb miss 453313
random access tlb miss 41630
random access second tlb miss 41647
vmx andrea # ./largepages3
memset page fault 1566872
memset tlb miss 453418
memset second tlb miss 453315
random access tlb miss 41618
random access second tlb miss 41659
vmx andrea # echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/transparent_hugepage
vmx andrea # ./largepages3
memset page fault 2182476
memset tlb miss 460305
memset second tlb miss 460179
random access tlb miss 44483
random access second tlb miss 44186
vmx andrea # ./largepages3
memset page fault 2182791
memset tlb miss 460742
memset second tlb miss 459962
random access tlb miss 43981
random access second tlb miss 43988
============
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#define SIZE (3UL*1024*1024*1024)
int main()
{
char *p = malloc(SIZE), *p2;
struct timeval before, after;
gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
memset(p, 0, SIZE);
gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
printf("memset page fault %Lu\n",
(after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL +
after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec);
gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
memset(p, 0, SIZE);
gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
printf("memset tlb miss %Lu\n",
(after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL +
after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec);
gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
memset(p, 0, SIZE);
gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
printf("memset second tlb miss %Lu\n",
(after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL +
after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec);
gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096)
*p2 = 0;
gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
printf("random access tlb miss %Lu\n",
(after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL +
after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec);
gettimeofday(&before, NULL);
for (p2 = p; p2 < p+SIZE; p2 += 4096)
*p2 = 0;
gettimeofday(&after, NULL);
printf("random access second tlb miss %Lu\n",
(after.tv_sec-before.tv_sec)*1000000UL +
after.tv_usec-before.tv_usec);
return 0;
}
============
Signed-off-by: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
|
||
|---|---|---|
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| firmware | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt/kvm | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
| REPORTING-BUGS | ||
Linux kernel release 2.6.xx <http://kernel.org/>
These are the release notes for Linux version 2.6. Read them carefully,
as they tell you what this is all about, explain how to install the
kernel, and what to do if something goes wrong.
WHAT IS LINUX?
Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by
Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across
the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance.
It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix,
including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand
loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management,
and multistack networking including IPv4 and IPv6.
It is distributed under the GNU General Public License - see the
accompanying COPYING file for more details.
ON WHAT HARDWARE DOES IT RUN?
Although originally developed first for 32-bit x86-based PCs (386 or higher),
today Linux also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and
UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, Cell,
IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64, AXIS CRIS,
Xtensa, AVR32 and Renesas M32R architectures.
Linux is easily portable to most general-purpose 32- or 64-bit architectures
as long as they have a paged memory management unit (PMMU) and a port of the
GNU C compiler (gcc) (part of The GNU Compiler Collection, GCC). Linux has
also been ported to a number of architectures without a PMMU, although
functionality is then obviously somewhat limited.
Linux has also been ported to itself. You can now run the kernel as a
userspace application - this is called UserMode Linux (UML).
DOCUMENTATION:
- There is a lot of documentation available both in electronic form on
the Internet and in books, both Linux-specific and pertaining to
general UNIX questions. I'd recommend looking into the documentation
subdirectories on any Linux FTP site for the LDP (Linux Documentation
Project) books. This README is not meant to be documentation on the
system: there are much better sources available.
- There are various README files in the Documentation/ subdirectory:
these typically contain kernel-specific installation notes for some
drivers for example. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what
is contained in each file. Please read the Changes file, as it
contains information about the problems, which may result by upgrading
your kernel.
- The Documentation/DocBook/ subdirectory contains several guides for
kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a
number of formats: PostScript (.ps), PDF, HTML, & man-pages, among others.
After installation, "make psdocs", "make pdfdocs", "make htmldocs",
or "make mandocs" will render the documentation in the requested format.
INSTALLING the kernel source:
- If you install the full sources, put the kernel tarball in a
directory where you have permissions (eg. your home directory) and
unpack it:
gzip -cd linux-2.6.XX.tar.gz | tar xvf -
or
bzip2 -dc linux-2.6.XX.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
Replace "XX" with the version number of the latest kernel.
Do NOT use the /usr/src/linux area! This area has a (usually
incomplete) set of kernel headers that are used by the library header
files. They should match the library, and not get messed up by
whatever the kernel-du-jour happens to be.
- You can also upgrade between 2.6.xx releases by patching. Patches are
distributed in the traditional gzip and the newer bzip2 format. To
install by patching, get all the newer patch files, enter the
top level directory of the kernel source (linux-2.6.xx) and execute:
gzip -cd ../patch-2.6.xx.gz | patch -p1
or
bzip2 -dc ../patch-2.6.xx.bz2 | patch -p1
(repeat xx for all versions bigger than the version of your current
source tree, _in_order_) and you should be ok. You may want to remove
the backup files (xxx~ or xxx.orig), and make sure that there are no
failed patches (xxx# or xxx.rej). If there are, either you or me has
made a mistake.
Unlike patches for the 2.6.x kernels, patches for the 2.6.x.y kernels
(also known as the -stable kernels) are not incremental but instead apply
directly to the base 2.6.x kernel. Please read
Documentation/applying-patches.txt for more information.
Alternatively, the script patch-kernel can be used to automate this
process. It determines the current kernel version and applies any
patches found.
linux/scripts/patch-kernel linux
The first argument in the command above is the location of the
kernel source. Patches are applied from the current directory, but
an alternative directory can be specified as the second argument.
- If you are upgrading between releases using the stable series patches
(for example, patch-2.6.xx.y), note that these "dot-releases" are
not incremental and must be applied to the 2.6.xx base tree. For
example, if your base kernel is 2.6.12 and you want to apply the
2.6.12.3 patch, you do not and indeed must not first apply the
2.6.12.1 and 2.6.12.2 patches. Similarly, if you are running kernel
version 2.6.12.2 and want to jump to 2.6.12.3, you must first
reverse the 2.6.12.2 patch (that is, patch -R) _before_ applying
the 2.6.12.3 patch.
You can read more on this in Documentation/applying-patches.txt
- Make sure you have no stale .o files and dependencies lying around:
cd linux
make mrproper
You should now have the sources correctly installed.
SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
Compiling and running the 2.6.xx kernels requires up-to-date
versions of various software packages. Consult
Documentation/Changes for the minimum version numbers required
and how to get updates for these packages. Beware that using
excessively old versions of these packages can cause indirect
errors that are very difficult to track down, so don't assume that
you can just update packages when obvious problems arise during
build or operation.
BUILD directory for the kernel:
When compiling the kernel all output files will per default be
stored together with the kernel source code.
Using the option "make O=output/dir" allow you to specify an alternate
place for the output files (including .config).
Example:
kernel source code: /usr/src/linux-2.6.N
build directory: /home/name/build/kernel
To configure and build the kernel use:
cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.N
make O=/home/name/build/kernel menuconfig
make O=/home/name/build/kernel
sudo make O=/home/name/build/kernel modules_install install
Please note: If the 'O=output/dir' option is used then it must be
used for all invocations of make.
CONFIGURING the kernel:
Do not skip this step even if you are only upgrading one minor
version. New configuration options are added in each release, and
odd problems will turn up if the configuration files are not set up
as expected. If you want to carry your existing configuration to a
new version with minimal work, use "make oldconfig", which will
only ask you for the answers to new questions.
- Alternate configuration commands are:
"make config" Plain text interface.
"make menuconfig" Text based color menus, radiolists & dialogs.
"make nconfig" Enhanced text based color menus.
"make xconfig" X windows (Qt) based configuration tool.
"make gconfig" X windows (Gtk) based configuration tool.
"make oldconfig" Default all questions based on the contents of
your existing ./.config file and asking about
new config symbols.
"make silentoldconfig"
Like above, but avoids cluttering the screen
with questions already answered.
Additionally updates the dependencies.
"make defconfig" Create a ./.config file by using the default
symbol values from either arch/$ARCH/defconfig
or arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig,
depending on the architecture.
"make ${PLATFORM}_defconfig"
Create a ./.config file by using the default
symbol values from
arch/$ARCH/configs/${PLATFORM}_defconfig.
Use "make help" to get a list of all available
platforms of your architecture.
"make allyesconfig"
Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'y' as much as possible.
"make allmodconfig"
Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'm' as much as possible.
"make allnoconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to 'n' as much as possible.
"make randconfig" Create a ./.config file by setting symbol
values to random values.
You can find more information on using the Linux kernel config tools
in Documentation/kbuild/kconfig.txt.
NOTES on "make config":
- having unnecessary drivers will make the kernel bigger, and can
under some circumstances lead to problems: probing for a
nonexistent controller card may confuse your other controllers
- compiling the kernel with "Processor type" set higher than 386
will result in a kernel that does NOT work on a 386. The
kernel will detect this on bootup, and give up.
- A kernel with math-emulation compiled in will still use the
coprocessor if one is present: the math emulation will just
never get used in that case. The kernel will be slightly larger,
but will work on different machines regardless of whether they
have a math coprocessor or not.
- the "kernel hacking" configuration details usually result in a
bigger or slower kernel (or both), and can even make the kernel
less stable by configuring some routines to actively try to
break bad code to find kernel problems (kmalloc()). Thus you
should probably answer 'n' to the questions for
"development", "experimental", or "debugging" features.
COMPILING the kernel:
- Make sure you have at least gcc 3.2 available.
For more information, refer to Documentation/Changes.
Please note that you can still run a.out user programs with this kernel.
- Do a "make" to create a compressed kernel image. It is also
possible to do "make install" if you have lilo installed to suit the
kernel makefiles, but you may want to check your particular lilo setup first.
To do the actual install you have to be root, but none of the normal
build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain.
- If you configured any of the parts of the kernel as `modules', you
will also have to do "make modules_install".
- Verbose kernel compile/build output:
Normally the kernel build system runs in a fairly quiet mode (but not
totally silent). However, sometimes you or other kernel developers need
to see compile, link, or other commands exactly as they are executed.
For this, use "verbose" build mode. This is done by inserting
"V=1" in the "make" command. E.g.:
make V=1 all
To have the build system also tell the reason for the rebuild of each
target, use "V=2". The default is "V=0".
- Keep a backup kernel handy in case something goes wrong. This is
especially true for the development releases, since each new release
contains new code which has not been debugged. Make sure you keep a
backup of the modules corresponding to that kernel, as well. If you
are installing a new kernel with the same version number as your
working kernel, make a backup of your modules directory before you
do a "make modules_install".
Alternatively, before compiling, use the kernel config option
"LOCALVERSION" to append a unique suffix to the regular kernel version.
LOCALVERSION can be set in the "General Setup" menu.
- In order to boot your new kernel, you'll need to copy the kernel
image (e.g. .../linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage after compilation)
to the place where your regular bootable kernel is found.
- Booting a kernel directly from a floppy without the assistance of a
bootloader such as LILO, is no longer supported.
If you boot Linux from the hard drive, chances are you use LILO which
uses the kernel image as specified in the file /etc/lilo.conf. The
kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or
/boot/bzImage. To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image
and copy the new image over the old one. Then, you MUST RERUN LILO
to update the loading map!! If you don't, you won't be able to boot
the new kernel image.
Reinstalling LILO is usually a matter of running /sbin/lilo.
You may wish to edit /etc/lilo.conf to specify an entry for your
old kernel image (say, /vmlinux.old) in case the new one does not
work. See the LILO docs for more information.
After reinstalling LILO, you should be all set. Shutdown the system,
reboot, and enjoy!
If you ever need to change the default root device, video mode,
ramdisk size, etc. in the kernel image, use the 'rdev' program (or
alternatively the LILO boot options when appropriate). No need to
recompile the kernel to change these parameters.
- Reboot with the new kernel and enjoy.
IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG:
- If you have problems that seem to be due to kernel bugs, please check
the file MAINTAINERS to see if there is a particular person associated
with the part of the kernel that you are having trouble with. If there
isn't anyone listed there, then the second best thing is to mail
them to me (torvalds@linux-foundation.org), and possibly to any other
relevant mailing-list or to the newsgroup.
- In all bug-reports, *please* tell what kernel you are talking about,
how to duplicate the problem, and what your setup is (use your common
sense). If the problem is new, tell me so, and if the problem is
old, please try to tell me when you first noticed it.
- If the bug results in a message like
unable to handle kernel paging request at address C0000010
Oops: 0002
EIP: 0010:XXXXXXXX
eax: xxxxxxxx ebx: xxxxxxxx ecx: xxxxxxxx edx: xxxxxxxx
esi: xxxxxxxx edi: xxxxxxxx ebp: xxxxxxxx
ds: xxxx es: xxxx fs: xxxx gs: xxxx
Pid: xx, process nr: xx
xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx
or similar kernel debugging information on your screen or in your
system log, please duplicate it *exactly*. The dump may look
incomprehensible to you, but it does contain information that may
help debugging the problem. The text above the dump is also
important: it tells something about why the kernel dumped code (in
the above example it's due to a bad kernel pointer). More information
on making sense of the dump is in Documentation/oops-tracing.txt
- If you compiled the kernel with CONFIG_KALLSYMS you can send the dump
as is, otherwise you will have to use the "ksymoops" program to make
sense of the dump (but compiling with CONFIG_KALLSYMS is usually preferred).
This utility can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops/ .
Alternately you can do the dump lookup by hand:
- In debugging dumps like the above, it helps enormously if you can
look up what the EIP value means. The hex value as such doesn't help
me or anybody else very much: it will depend on your particular
kernel setup. What you should do is take the hex value from the EIP
line (ignore the "0010:"), and look it up in the kernel namelist to
see which kernel function contains the offending address.
To find out the kernel function name, you'll need to find the system
binary associated with the kernel that exhibited the symptom. This is
the file 'linux/vmlinux'. To extract the namelist and match it against
the EIP from the kernel crash, do:
nm vmlinux | sort | less
This will give you a list of kernel addresses sorted in ascending
order, from which it is simple to find the function that contains the
offending address. Note that the address given by the kernel
debugging messages will not necessarily match exactly with the
function addresses (in fact, that is very unlikely), so you can't
just 'grep' the list: the list will, however, give you the starting
point of each kernel function, so by looking for the function that
has a starting address lower than the one you are searching for but
is followed by a function with a higher address you will find the one
you want. In fact, it may be a good idea to include a bit of
"context" in your problem report, giving a few lines around the
interesting one.
If you for some reason cannot do the above (you have a pre-compiled
kernel image or similar), telling me as much about your setup as
possible will help. Please read the REPORTING-BUGS document for details.
- Alternately, you can use gdb on a running kernel. (read-only; i.e. you
cannot change values or set break points.) To do this, first compile the
kernel with -g; edit arch/i386/Makefile appropriately, then do a "make
clean". You'll also need to enable CONFIG_PROC_FS (via "make config").
After you've rebooted with the new kernel, do "gdb vmlinux /proc/kcore".
You can now use all the usual gdb commands. The command to look up the
point where your system crashed is "l *0xXXXXXXXX". (Replace the XXXes
with the EIP value.)
gdb'ing a non-running kernel currently fails because gdb (wrongly)
disregards the starting offset for which the kernel is compiled.