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1 | |||
2 | Hypervisor-Assisted Dump | ||
3 | ------------------------ | ||
4 | November 2007 | ||
5 | |||
6 | The goal of hypervisor-assisted dump is to enable the dump of | ||
7 | a crashed system, and to do so from a fully-reset system, and | ||
8 | to minimize the total elapsed time until the system is back | ||
9 | in production use. | ||
10 | |||
11 | As compared to kdump or other strategies, hypervisor-assisted | ||
12 | dump offers several strong, practical advantages: | ||
13 | |||
14 | -- Unlike kdump, the system has been reset, and loaded | ||
15 | with a fresh copy of the kernel. In particular, | ||
16 | PCI and I/O devices have been reinitialized and are | ||
17 | in a clean, consistent state. | ||
18 | -- As the dump is performed, the dumped memory becomes | ||
19 | immediately available to the system for normal use. | ||
20 | -- After the dump is completed, no further reboots are | ||
21 | required; the system will be fully usable, and running | ||
22 | in its normal, production mode on its normal kernel. | ||
23 | |||
24 | The above can only be accomplished by coordination with, | ||
25 | and assistance from the hypervisor. The procedure is | ||
26 | as follows: | ||
27 | |||
28 | -- When a system crashes, the hypervisor will save | ||
29 | the low 256MB of RAM to a previously registered | ||
30 | save region. It will also save system state, system | ||
31 | registers, and hardware PTE's. | ||
32 | |||
33 | -- After the low 256MB area has been saved, the | ||
34 | hypervisor will reset PCI and other hardware state. | ||
35 | It will *not* clear RAM. It will then launch the | ||
36 | bootloader, as normal. | ||
37 | |||
38 | -- The freshly booted kernel will notice that there | ||
39 | is a new node (ibm,dump-kernel) in the device tree, | ||
40 | indicating that there is crash data available from | ||
41 | a previous boot. It will boot into only 256MB of RAM, | ||
42 | reserving the rest of system memory. | ||
43 | |||
44 | -- Userspace tools will parse /sys/kernel/release_region | ||
45 | and read /proc/vmcore to obtain the contents of memory, | ||
46 | which holds the previous crashed kernel. The userspace | ||
47 | tools may copy this info to disk, or network, nas, san, | ||
48 | iscsi, etc. as desired. | ||
49 | |||
50 | For Example: the values in /sys/kernel/release-region | ||
51 | would look something like this (address-range pairs). | ||
52 | CPU:0x177fee000-0x10000: HPTE:0x177ffe020-0x1000: / | ||
53 | DUMP:0x177fff020-0x10000000, 0x10000000-0x16F1D370A | ||
54 | |||
55 | -- As the userspace tools complete saving a portion of | ||
56 | dump, they echo an offset and size to | ||
57 | /sys/kernel/release_region to release the reserved | ||
58 | memory back to general use. | ||
59 | |||
60 | An example of this is: | ||
61 | "echo 0x40000000 0x10000000 > /sys/kernel/release_region" | ||
62 | which will release 256MB at the 1GB boundary. | ||
63 | |||
64 | Please note that the hypervisor-assisted dump feature | ||
65 | is only available on Power6-based systems with recent | ||
66 | firmware versions. | ||
67 | |||
68 | Implementation details: | ||
69 | ---------------------- | ||
70 | |||
71 | During boot, a check is made to see if firmware supports | ||
72 | this feature on this particular machine. If it does, then | ||
73 | we check to see if a active dump is waiting for us. If yes | ||
74 | then everything but 256 MB of RAM is reserved during early | ||
75 | boot. This area is released once we collect a dump from user | ||
76 | land scripts that are run. If there is dump data, then | ||
77 | the /sys/kernel/release_region file is created, and | ||
78 | the reserved memory is held. | ||
79 | |||
80 | If there is no waiting dump data, then only the highest | ||
81 | 256MB of the ram is reserved as a scratch area. This area | ||
82 | is *not* released: this region will be kept permanently | ||
83 | reserved, so that it can act as a receptacle for a copy | ||
84 | of the low 256MB in the case a crash does occur. See, | ||
85 | however, "open issues" below, as to whether | ||
86 | such a reserved region is really needed. | ||
87 | |||
88 | Currently the dump will be copied from /proc/vmcore to a | ||
89 | a new file upon user intervention. The starting address | ||
90 | to be read and the range for each data point in provided | ||
91 | in /sys/kernel/release_region. | ||
92 | |||
93 | The tools to examine the dump will be same as the ones | ||
94 | used for kdump. | ||
95 | |||
96 | General notes: | ||
97 | -------------- | ||
98 | Security: please note that there are potential security issues | ||
99 | with any sort of dump mechanism. In particular, plaintext | ||
100 | (unencrypted) data, and possibly passwords, may be present in | ||
101 | the dump data. Userspace tools must take adequate precautions to | ||
102 | preserve security. | ||
103 | |||
104 | Open issues/ToDo: | ||
105 | ------------ | ||
106 | o The various code paths that tell the hypervisor that a crash | ||
107 | occurred, vs. it simply being a normal reboot, should be | ||
108 | reviewed, and possibly clarified/fixed. | ||
109 | |||
110 | o Instead of using /sys/kernel, should there be a /sys/dump | ||
111 | instead? There is a dump_subsys being created by the s390 code, | ||
112 | perhaps the pseries code should use a similar layout as well. | ||
113 | |||
114 | o Is reserving a 256MB region really required? The goal of | ||
115 | reserving a 256MB scratch area is to make sure that no | ||
116 | important crash data is clobbered when the hypervisor | ||
117 | save low mem to the scratch area. But, if one could assure | ||
118 | that nothing important is located in some 256MB area, then | ||
119 | it would not need to be reserved. Something that can be | ||
120 | improved in subsequent versions. | ||
121 | |||
122 | o Still working the kdump team to integrate this with kdump, | ||
123 | some work remains but this would not affect the current | ||
124 | patches. | ||
125 | |||
126 | o Still need to write a shell script, to copy the dump away. | ||
127 | Currently I am parsing it manually. | ||