Lcrash HOWTO

Andreas Herrman

aherrman@de.ibm.com

This document describes lcrash, the Linux crash dump analyzer.

Most commercial UNIX systems have a feature that dumps the real storage to disk in case of a system crash. Afterwards a dump-analysis tool is used to analyze such dumps of the system's memory state at the time of the system crash.

A team at SGI has worked on extensions of the Linux Kernel to provide such a dump feature for GNU/Linux. They called their project Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (LKCD). The analysis tool lcrash (Linux Crash) is a part of LKCD.

Please refer to the LKCD Project Home Page. The LKCD code was released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and it is available from sourceforge.

This is the first version of the document. It is written in DocBook 4.1. Please let me know if you find any markup and other errors.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 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".


Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1.1. About lcrash
1.2. About this HOWTO
2. Installation
2.1. Where to get the code
2.2. Install rpm packages
2.3. Compile and Install lcrash
2.4. LKCD CVS Repository
3. General Usage
3.1. Invoking Lcrash
3.2. User Interface
4. Lcrash Command Reference
4.1. Command Overview
4.2. Common Options
4.3. base
4.4. deftask
4.5. dis
4.6. dump
4.7. findsym
4.8. help
4.9. history
4.10. ldcmds
4.11. livedump
4.12. load
4.13. mktrace
4.14. mmap
4.15. module
4.16. namelist
4.17. page
4.18. print
4.19. quit
4.20. report
4.21. s390dbf
4.22. sizeof
4.23. stat
4.24. strace
4.25. symtab
4.26. task
4.27. trace
4.28. unload
4.29. vi
4.30. vtop
4.31. walk
4.32. whatis
5. Sample lcrash Sessions
5.1. Analyze Kernel Modules
A. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents
Bibliography
List of Tables
3-1. Default values
3-2. Command Line History
3-3. Command Line Keys
4-1. Overview of lcrash commands
4-2. Classification of lcrash commands
List of Examples
3-1. Starting Lcrash
4-1. base
4-2. deftask
4-3. dis (i386)
4-4. dis (s390)
4-5. dump
4-6. findsym
4-7. help
4-8. history
4-9. mmap
4-10. module
4-11. namelist
4-12. quit
4-13. sizeof
4-14. stat (s390)
4-15. stat (i386)
4-16. strace (s390)
4-17. symtab
4-18. task
4-19. trace
4-20. vtop
4-21. vtop
4-22. walk
4-23. walk
4-24. walk
4-25. whatis