Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v8] kvm: notify host when the guest is panicked

[Yan Vugenfirer]

On Aug 14, 2012, at 1:42 PM, Jan Kiszka wrote:

> On 2012-08-14 10:56, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 03:21:32PM -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
>>> On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 10:43:01AM +0800, Wen Congyang wrote:
>>>> We can know the guest is panicked when the guest runs on xen.
>>>> But we do not have such feature on kvm.
>>>> 
>>>> Another purpose of this feature is: management app(for example:
>>>> libvirt) can do auto dump when the guest is panicked. If management
>>>> app does not do auto dump, the guest's user can do dump by hand if
>>>> he sees the guest is panicked.
>>>> 
>>>> We have three solutions to implement this feature:
>>>> 1. use vmcall
>>>> 2. use I/O port
>>>> 3. use virtio-serial.
>>>> 
>>>> We have decided to avoid touching hypervisor. The reason why I choose
>>>> choose the I/O port is:
>>>> 1. it is easier to implememt
>>>> 2. it does not depend any virtual device
>>>> 3. it can work when starting the kernel
>>> 
>>> How about searching for the "Kernel panic - not syncing" string 
>>> in the guests serial output? Say libvirtd could take an action upon
>>> that?
>> 
>> No, this is not satisfactory. It depends on the guest OS being
>> configured to use the serial port for console output which we
>> cannot mandate, since it may well be required for other purposes.
> 
Please don't forget Windows guests, there is no console and no "Kernel Panic" 
string ;)

What I used for debugging purposes on Windows guest is to register a bugcheck 
callback in virtio-net driver and write 1 to VIRTIO_PCI_ISR register.

Yan. 


> Well, we have more than a single serial port, even when leaving
> virtio-serial aside...
> 
> Jan
> 
> -- 
> Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, CT RTC ITP SDP-DE
> Corporate Competence Center Embedded Linux
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in
> the body of a message to address@hidden
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html