Before Cavium switched to ARM64 CPUs they developed quite powerful MIPS based SOCs. The current upstream Linux kernel already supports some Octeon SOCs, but not the latest versions. Goal of this Hack Week project is to use the latest Cavium SDK to update the Linux kernel code to let it running on CN23XX network cards.

Looking for hackers with the skills:

kernel mips

This project is part of:

Hack Week 22 Hack Week 24

Activity

  • 8 months ago: mbrugger liked this project.
  • 11 months ago: Murielabshir joined this project.
  • over 2 years ago: a_faerber liked this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tsbogend added keyword "kernel" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tsbogend added keyword "mips" to this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tsbogend started this project.
  • over 2 years ago: tsbogend originated this project.

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    early stage kdump support by mbrugger

    Project Description

    When we experience a early boot crash, we are not able to analyze the kernel dump, as user-space wasn't able to load the crash system. The idea is to make the crash system compiled into the host kernel (think of initramfs) so that we can create a kernel dump really early in the boot process.

    Goal for the Hackweeks

    1. Investigate if this is possible and the implications it would have (done in HW21)
    2. Hack up a PoC (done in HW22 and HW23)
    3. Prepare RFC series (giving it's only one week, we are entering wishful thinking territory here).

    update HW23

    • I was able to include the crash kernel into the kernel Image.
    • I'll need to find a way to load that from init/main.c:start_kernel() probably after kcsan_init()
    • I workaround for a smoke test was to hack kexec_file_load() systemcall which has two problems:
      1. My initramfs in the porduction kernel does not have a new enough kexec version, that's not a blocker but where the week ended
      2. As the crash kernel is part of init.data it will be already stale once I can call kexec_file_load() from user-space.

    The solution is probably to rewrite the POC so that the invocation can be done from init.text (that's my theory) but I'm not sure if I can reuse the kexec infrastructure in the kernel from there, which I rely on heavily.

    update HW24

    • Day1
      • rebased on v6.12 with no problems others then me breaking the config
      • setting up a new compilation and qemu/virtme env
      • getting desperate as nothing works that used to work
    • Day 2
      • getting to call the invocation of loading the early kernel from __init after kcsan_init()
    • Day 3

      • fix problem of memdup not being able to alloc so much memory... use 64K page sizes for now
      • code refactoring
      • I'm now able to load the crash kernel
      • When using virtme I can boot into the crash kernel, also it doesn't boot completely (major milestone!), crash in elfcorehdr_read_notes()
    • Day 4

      • crash systems crashes (no pun intended) in copy_old_mempage() link; will need to understand elfcorehdr...
      • call path vmcore_init() -> parse_crash_elf_headers() -> elfcorehdr_read() -> read_from_oldmem() -> copy_oldmem_page() -> copy_to_iter()
    • Day 5

      • hacking arch/arm64/kernel/crash_dump.c:copy_old_mempage() to see if crash system really starts. It does.
      • fun fact: retested with more reserved memory and with UEFI FW, host kernel crashes in init but directly starts the crash kernel, so it works (somehow) \o/
    • TODOs

      • fix elfcorehdr so that we actually can make use of all this...
      • test where in the boot __init() chain we can/should call kexec_early_dump()