On BMC machines, console output is controlled by the OPAL firmware and is
only flushed when its pollers are called. When the kernel is in a panic
state, it no longer calls these pollers and thus console output does not
completely flush, causing some output from the panic to be lost.
Output is only actually lost when the kernel is configured to not power off
or reboot after panic (i.e. CONFIG_PANIC_TIMEOUT is set to 0) since OPAL
flushes the console buffer as part of its power down routines. Before this
patch, however, only partial output would be printed during the timeout wait.
This patch adds a new kmsg_dumper which gets called at panic time to ensure
panic output is not lost. It accomplishes this by calling OPAL_CONSOLE_FLUSH
in the OPAL API, and if that is not available, the pollers are called enough
times to (hopefully) completely flush the buffer.
The flushing mechanism will only affect output printed at and before the
kmsg_dump call in kernel/panic.c:panic(). As such, the "end Kernel panic"
message may still be truncated as follows:
>Call Trace:
>[c000000f1f603b00] [c0000000008e9458] dump_stack+0x90/0xbc (unreliable)
>[c000000f1f603b30] [c0000000008e7e78] panic+0xf8/0x2c4
>[c000000f1f603bc0] [c000000000be4860] mount_block_root+0x288/0x33c
>[c000000f1f603c80] [c000000000be4d14] prepare_namespace+0x1f4/0x254
>[c000000f1f603d00] [c000000000be43e8] kernel_init_freeable+0x318/0x350
>[c000000f1f603dc0] [c00000000000bd74] kernel_init+0x24/0x130
>[c000000f1f603e30] [c0000000000095b0] ret_from_kernel_thread+0x5c/0xac
>---[ end Kernel panic - not
This functionality is implemented as a kmsg_dumper as it seems to be the
most sensible way to introduce platform-specific functionality to the
panic function.
Signed-off-by: Russell Currey <ruscur@russell.cc>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Donnellan <andrew.donnellan@au1.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
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