Matt,
Responding to two of your notes (about the last lkcd code drop) in one
shot.
>I'm still planning to roll a 4.0 release as soon as I talk to
>the IBM folks about the last code drop I gave them.
We've tried this code out only a UP, and have just started trying it on a
SMP system. We had a few initial hiccups with dump configuration with the
original scripts, but using test.c and modifying the device number as you
suggested did the trick. As you've mentioned below new scripts and a new
dumpconfig utility would be required for the 4.0 release.
Before moving to SMP, we decided to first merge in our changes to enable
system continuation after a dump, by making the other CPUs spin for the
duration of the dump and then release them, rather than making them stop.
(We are now using dprobes to trigger the dump from a probe point to test
our changes.)
I'm hoping that we can include this in the 4.0 release together with SMP
problem fixes that you are working on. When are you planning on the release
?
The next thing that we are trying to implement is to get non-disruptive
dumps to work from any context, including interrupt context, based on some
of the ideas we'd discussed earlier. We are attempting to get this to work
with the current basic dump i/o model for the non-disruptive dumps case.
(We may need to relook at it later once the dump driver interface is in
place, though only for devices that implement/register such an interface)
Will discuss this in more detail after we've tried out a few things ...
>For those who are working directly in the tree, you'll note we're
>now moving from 'vmdump' to 'dump' conventions, and hopefully all
>the future scripts will use this as well.
BTW, I did try directly accessing the CVS tree, which works.
>Also, I spoke to someone at MCL, and we'll see how we can roll in
>mcore into the LKCD project in some capacity.
That's good news! We wanted to check with you on this. Do we now have a
contact at MCL whom we can work with to do this, so that we have a fallback
standalone dump feature ?
>The latest code is in the SourceForge tree ... look in
>2.4/drivers/block/dump.c,
>and you'll see the restructuring changes. 'lcrash' has also
>changed a bit.I copied the LKCD group on my last check-in.
>If you didn't get a copy of it,let me know. It touched a bunch
>of files.
>I have to check in new scripts and a new dumpconfig utility next
>(and fix this bloody SMP problem now that I actually have an SMP
>system again to test against).
Do let us know how this goes. We had to give some thought to a few of the
SMP issues for the non-disruptive case (not that we're sure if we've got it
right or thought of all subtle race possibilities ! ), so it would be
interesting to discuss this more (I remember you mentioned fixing the CPU 0
special cases when we talked last).
Regards
Suparna
Suparna Bhattacharya
IBM Software Lab, India
E-mail : bsuparna@xxxxxxxxxx
Phone : 91-80-5267117, Extn : 3961
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