HomeFreeBSD

Add new vnode dumper to support live minidumps

Description

Add new vnode dumper to support live minidumps

This dumper can instantiate and write the dump's contents to a
file-backed vnode.

Unlike existing disk or network dumpers, the vnode dumper should not be
invoked during a system panic, and therefore is not added to the global
dumper_configs list. Instead, the vnode dumper is constructed ad-hoc
when a live dump is requested using the new ioctl on /dev/mem. This is
similar in spirit to a kgdb session against the live system via
/dev/mem.

As described briefly in the mem(4) man page, live dumps are not
guaranteed to result in a usuable output file, but offer some debugging
value where forcefully panicing a system to dump its memory is not
desirable/feasible.

A future change to savecore(8) will add an option to save a live dump.

Reviewed by: markj, Pau Amma <pauamma@gundo.com> (manpages)
Discussed with: kib
MFC after: 3 weeks
Sponsored by: Juniper Networks, Inc.
Sponsored by: Klara, Inc.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D33813

Details

Provenance
mhorneAuthored on Mar 23 2021, 8:47 PM
Reviewer
markj
Differential Revision
D33813: Add new vnode dumper to support live minidumps
Parents
rG59c27ea18c32: Split out dumper allocation from list insertion
Branches
Unknown
Tags
Unknown