Patch series "Expose kallsyms data in vmcoreinfo note".
The kernel can be configured to contain a lot of introspection or
debugging information built-in, such as ORC for unwinding stack traces,
BTF for type information, and of course kallsyms. Debuggers could use
this information to navigate a core dump or live system, but they need to
be able to find it.
This patch series adds the necessary symbols into vmcoreinfo, which would
allow a debugger to find and interpret the kallsyms table. Using the
kallsyms data, the debugger can then lookup any symbol, allowing it to
find ORC, BTF, or any other useful data.
This would allow a live kernel, or core dump, to be debugged without any
DWARF debuginfo. This is useful for many cases: the debuginfo may not
have been generated, or you may not want to deploy the large files
everywhere you need them.
I've demonstrated a proof of concept for this at LSF/MM+BPF during a
lighting talk. Using a work-in-progress branch of the drgn debugger, and
an extended set of BTF generated by a patched version of dwarves, I've
been able to open a core dump without any DWARF info and do basic tasks
such as enumerating slab caches, block devices, tasks, and doing
backtraces. I hope this series can be a first step toward a new
possibility of "DWARFless debugging".
Related discussion around the BTF side of this:
https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/586a6288-704a-f7a7-b256-e18a675927df@oracle.com/T/#u
Some work-in-progress branches using this feature:
https://github.com/brenns10/dwarves/tree/remove_percpu_restriction_1https://github.com/brenns10/drgn/tree/kallsyms_plus_btf
This patch (of 2):
To include kallsyms data in the vmcoreinfo note, we must make the symbol
declarations visible outside of kallsyms.c. Move these to a new internal
header file.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220517000508.777145-1-stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220517000508.777145-2-stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com
Signed-off-by: Stephen Brennan <stephen.s.brennan@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Baoquan He <bhe@redhat.com>
Cc: Nick Desaulniers <ndesaulniers@google.com>
Cc: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Cc: Stephen Boyd <swboyd@chromium.org>
Cc: Bixuan Cui <cuibixuan@huawei.com>
Cc: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Sami Tolvanen <samitolvanen@google.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
