RE: [PATCH v2] x86_64, vmcoreinfo: Append 'page_offset_base' to vmcoreinfo

[Kazuhito Hagio]

On 11/15/2018 4:47 PM, Bhupesh Sharma wrote:
> Adding 'page_offset_base' to the vmcoreinfo can be specially useful for
> live-debugging of a running kernel via user-space utilities
> like makedumpfile (see [1]).

I agree.

> Recently, I saw an issue with the 'makedumpfile' utility (see [2] for
> details), whose live debugging feature is broken with newer kernels
> (I tested the same with 4.19-rc8+ kernel), as KCORE_REMAP segments were
> added to kcore, thus leading to an additional sections in the same, and
> makedumpfile is not longer able to determine the start of direct
> mapping of all physical memory, as it relies on traversing the PT_LOAD
> segments inside kcore and using the last PT_LOAD segment
> to determine the start of direct mapping.

Actually, the KCORE_REMAP segments were already removed from kcore by
commit bf904d2762ee ("x86/pti/64: Remove the SYSCALL64 entry trampoline")
and kcore's program headers got back to the previous ones, but this
fact shows that they are changeable.

So I think that if we have this NUMBER(page_offset_base) in vmcoreinfo
for x86_64, user-space tools (especially makedumpfile) would become
more stable against changes in kcore and vmcore, rather than depending
on their PT_LOAD values.

Thanks,
Kazu