Right now user-space tools like 'makedumpfile' and 'crash' need to rely on a best-guess method of determining value of 'MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS' supported by underlying kernel.
This value is used in user-space code to calculate the bit-space required to store a section for SPARESMEM (similar to the existing calculation method used in the kernel implementation): #define SECTIONS_SHIFT (MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS - SECTION_SIZE_BITS) Now, regressions have been reported in user-space utilities like 'makedumpfile' and 'crash' on arm64, with the recently added kernel support for 52-bit physical address space, as there is no clear method of determining this value in user-space (other than reading kernel CONFIG flags). As per suggestion from makedumpfile maintainer (Kazu), it makes more sense to append 'MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS' to vmcoreinfo in the core code itself rather than in arch-specific code, so that the user-space code for other archs can also benefit from this addition to the vmcoreinfo and use it as a standard way of determining 'SECTIONS_SHIFT' value in user-land. A reference 'makedumpfile' implementation which reads the 'MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS' value from vmcoreinfo in a arch-independent fashion is available here: [0]. https://github.com/bhupesh-sharma/makedumpfile/blob/remove-max-phys-mem-bit-v1/arch/ppc64.c#L471 Cc: Boris Petkov <b...@alien8.de> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mi...@kernel.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <t...@linutronix.de> Cc: James Morse <james.mo...@arm.com> Cc: Will Deacon <will.dea...@arm.com> Cc: Michael Ellerman <m...@ellerman.id.au> Cc: Paul Mackerras <pau...@samba.org> Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <b...@kernel.crashing.org> Cc: Dave Anderson <ander...@redhat.com> Cc: Kazuhito Hagio <k-ha...@ab.jp.nec.com> Cc: x...@kernel.org Cc: linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org Cc: linux-arm-ker...@lists.infradead.org Cc: linux-ker...@vger.kernel.org Cc: ke...@lists.infradead.org Signed-off-by: Bhupesh Sharma <bhsha...@redhat.com> --- kernel/crash_core.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/kernel/crash_core.c b/kernel/crash_core.c index 093c9f917ed0..44b90368e183 100644 --- a/kernel/crash_core.c +++ b/kernel/crash_core.c @@ -467,6 +467,7 @@ static int __init crash_save_vmcoreinfo_init(void) #define PAGE_OFFLINE_MAPCOUNT_VALUE (~PG_offline) VMCOREINFO_NUMBER(PAGE_OFFLINE_MAPCOUNT_VALUE); #endif + VMCOREINFO_NUMBER(MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS); arch_crash_save_vmcoreinfo(); update_vmcoreinfo_note(); -- 2.7.4
