On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 22:29 -0600, Nathan Lynch wrote:

Manish Ahuja wrote:

quoted

+
+                   Hypervisor-Assisted Dump
+                   ------------------------
+                       November 2007

Date is unneeded (and, uhm, dated :)

quoted

+The goal of hypervisor-assisted dump is to enable the dump of
+a crashed system, and to do so from a fully-reset system, and
+to minimize the total elapsed time until the system is back
+in production use.

Is it actually faster than kdump?

quoted

+As compared to kdump or other strategies, hypervisor-assisted
+dump offers several strong, practical advantages:
+
+-- Unlike kdump, the system has been reset, and loaded
+   with a fresh copy of the kernel.  In particular,
+   PCI and I/O devices have been reinitialized and are
+   in a clean, consistent state.
+-- As the dump is performed, the dumped memory becomes
+   immediately available to the system for normal use.
+-- After the dump is completed, no further reboots are
+   required; the system will be fully usable, and running
+   in it's normal, production mode on it normal kernel.
+
+The above can only be accomplished by coordination with,
+and assistance from the hypervisor. The procedure is
+as follows:
+
+-- When a system crashes, the hypervisor will save
+   the low 256MB of RAM to a previously registered
+   save region. It will also save system state, system
+   registers, and hardware PTE's.
+
+-- After the low 256MB area has been saved, the
+   hypervisor will reset PCI and other hardware state.
+   It will *not* clear RAM. It will then launch the
+   bootloader, as normal.
+
+-- The freshly booted kernel will notice that there
+   is a new node (ibm,dump-kernel) in the device tree,
+   indicating that there is crash data available from
+   a previous boot. It will boot into only 256MB of RAM,
+   reserving the rest of system memory.
+
+-- Userspace tools will parse /sys/kernel/release_region
+   and read /proc/vmcore to obtain the contents of memory,
+   which holds the previous crashed kernel. The userspace
+   tools may copy this info to disk, or network, nas, san,
+   iscsi, etc. as desired.
+
+   For Example: the values in /sys/kernel/release-region
+   would look something like this (address-range pairs).
+   CPU:0x177fee000-0x10000: HPTE:0x177ffe020-0x1000: /
+   DUMP:0x177fff020-0x10000000, 0x10000000-0x16F1D370A
+
+-- As the userspace tools complete saving a portion of
+   dump, they echo an offset and size to
+   /sys/kernel/release_region to release the reserved
+   memory back to general use.
+
+   An example of this is:
+     "echo 0x40000000 0x10000000 > /sys/kernel/release_region"
+   which will release 256MB at the 1GB boundary.

This violates the "one file, one value" rule of sysfs, but nobody
really takes that seriously, I guess.  In any case, consider
documenting this in Documentation/ABI.

quoted

+
+Please note that the hypervisor-assisted dump feature
+is only available on Power6-based systems with recent
+firmware versions.

This statement will of course become dated/incorrect so I recommend
removing it.

quoted

+
+Implementation details:
+----------------------
+In order for this scheme to work, memory needs to be reserved
+quite early in the boot cycle. However, access to the device
+tree this early in the boot cycle is difficult, and device-tree
+access is needed to determine if there is a crash data waiting.

I don't think this bit about early device tree access is correct.  By
the time your code is reserving memory (from early_init_devtree(), I
think), RTAS has been instantiated and you are able to test for the
existence of /rtas/ibm,dump-kernel.

Yep it's early_init_devtree(), and yes it's fairly easy to access the
(flattened) device tree at that point.

quoted

+To work around this problem, all but 256MB of RAM is reserved
+during early boot. A short while later in boot, a check is made
+to determine if there is dump data waiting. If there isn't,
+then the reserved memory is released to general kernel use.

So I think these gymnastics are unneeded -- unless I'm
misunderstanding something, you should be able to determine very early
whether to reserve that memory.

I agree.

cheers

-- 
Michael Ellerman
OzLabs, IBM Australia Development Lab

wwweb: http://michael.ellerman.id.au
phone: +61 2 6212 1183 (tie line 70 21183)

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children. - S.M.A.R.T Person