White Paper: Red Hat Crash Utility

by David Anderson
<anderson@redhat.com>

Copyright © 2003 by Red Hat Software, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of
the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the
Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Content

  1. Why Crash?
  2. Prerequisites
  3. Build Procedure
  4. Invocation
  5. Command Input
  6. Command Output
  7. Crash Context
  8. Builtin Help
  9. The Command Set
  10. Crash Usage: A Case Study
  11. Command Extensions
  12. GNU Free Documentation License

Abstract

The Red Hat crash analysis utility is loosely based on the SVR4 UNIX crash command, but has been significantly enhanced by completely merging it with the GNU gdb debugger. The marriage of the two effectively combines the kernel-specific nature of the traditional UNIX crash utility with the source code level debugging capabilities of gdb. The utility can be used to investigate:

The current set of commands consist of common kernel core analysis tools such as kernel stack back traces of all processes, source code disassembly, formatted kernel structure and variable displays, virtual memory data, dumps of linked-lists, etc., along with several commands that delve deeper into specific kernel subsystems. Relevant gdb commands may also be entered, which in turn are passed on to the gdb module for execution.

The crash utility is designed to be independent of Linux version dependencies. When new kernel source code impacts the correct functionality of crash and its command set, the utility will be updated to recognize new kernel code changes while maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier releases.


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