Kicking the little puppies

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First published
Sun Mar 29 17:20:07 2009
Last changed
Sun Mar 29 17:20:07 2009

Trouble running crash against live system?

If you've attempted to run crash against live system with recent Rawhide kernel that doesn't ship the crash driver, but uses /dev/mem to access memory, you've probably failed, getting an error message similar to this:

  crash: read error: kernel virtual address: c0abb600  type: "xtime"

That's because for some unknown reason /dev/mem is limited to first 256 pages. Until this is fixed upstream, here's a simple SystemTap script that tricks the range-checking routine into thinking that our access is not beyond the 256-page boundary:

  probe kernel.function("devmem_is_allowed")
  {
        $pagenr = 0;
  }

It modifies a local variable, so it has to be run in Guru mode:

  [root@bimbo stap]# stap -g devmem.stp 

Voila, crash works.


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