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2018-12-21powerpc/fadump: Reservationless firmware assisted dumpMahesh Salgaonkar
One of the primary issues with Firmware Assisted Dump (fadump) on Power is that it needs a large amount of memory to be reserved. On large systems with TeraBytes of memory, this reservation can be quite significant. In some cases, fadump fails if the memory reserved is insufficient, or if the reserved memory was DLPAR hot-removed. In the normal case, post reboot, the preserved memory is filtered to extract only relevant areas of interest using the makedumpfile tool. While the tool provides flexibility to determine what needs to be part of the dump and what memory to filter out, all supported distributions default this to "Capture only kernel data and nothing else". We take advantage of this default and the Linux kernel's Contiguous Memory Allocator (CMA) to fundamentally change the memory reservation model for fadump. Instead of setting aside a significant chunk of memory nobody can use, this patch uses CMA instead, to reserve a significant chunk of memory that the kernel is prevented from using (due to MIGRATE_CMA), but applications are free to use it. With this fadump will still be able to capture all of the kernel memory and most of the user space memory except the user pages that were present in CMA region. Essentially, on a P9 LPAR with 2 cores, 8GB RAM and current upstream: [root@zzxx-yy10 ~]# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 7557 193 6822 12 541 6725 Swap: 4095 0 4095 With this patch: [root@zzxx-yy10 ~]# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 8133 194 7464 12 475 7338 Swap: 4095 0 4095 Changes made here are completely transparent to how fadump has traditionally worked. Thanks to Aneesh Kumar and Anshuman Khandual for helping us understand CMA and its usage. TODO: - Handle case where CMA reservation spans nodes. Signed-off-by: Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli <ananth@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Hari Bathini <hbathini@linux.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
2017-06-02powerpc/fadump: Update comment about offset where fadump is reservedHari Bathini
With commit f6e6bedb7731 ("powerpc/fadump: Reserve memory at an offset closer to bottom of RAM"), memory for fadump is no longer reserved at the top of RAM. But there are still a few places which say so. Change them appropriately. Signed-off-by: Hari Bathini <hbathini@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
2017-05-08powerpc/fadump: update documentation about crashkernel parameter reuseHari Bathini
As we are reusing crashkernel parameter instead of fadump_reserve_mem parameter to specify the memory to reserve for fadump's crash kernel, update the documentation accordingly. Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/149035347559.6881.14224829694291758581.stgit@hbathini.in.ibm.com Signed-off-by: Hari Bathini <hbathini@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au> Cc: Fenghua Yu <fenghua.yu@intel.com> Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com> Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com> Cc: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> Cc: Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2017-03-31powerpc/fadump: Update fadump documentationHari Bathini
With the unnecessary restriction to reserve memory for fadump at the top of RAM forgone, update the documentation accordingly. Signed-off-by: Hari Bathini <hbathini@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
2012-02-23fadump: Add documentation for firmware-assisted dump.Mahesh Salgaonkar
Documentation for firmware-assisted dump. This document is based on the original documentation written for phyp assisted dump by Linas Vepstas and Manish Ahuja, with few changes to reflect the current implementation. Signed-off-by: Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>