Many devices run firmware and/or complex hardware, and most of that
can have bugs. When it misbehaves, however, it is often much harder
to debug than software running on the host.
Introduce a "device coredump" mechanism to allow dumping internal
device/firmware state through a generalized mechanism. As devices
are different and information needed can vary accordingly, this
doesn't prescribe a file format - it just provides mechanism to
get data to be able to capture it in a generalized way (e.g. in
distributions.)
The dumped data will be readable in sysfs in the virtual device's
data file under /sys/class/devcoredump/devcd*/. Writing to it will
free the data and remove the device, as does a 5-minute timeout.
Note that generalized capturing of such data may result in privacy
issues, so users generally need to be involved. In order to allow
certain users/system integrators/... to disable the feature at all,
introduce a Kconfig option to override the drivers that would like
to have the feature.
For now, this provides two ways of dumping data:
1) with a vmalloc'ed area, that is then given to the subsystem
and freed after retrieval or timeout
2) with a generalized reader/free function method
We could/should add more options, e.g. a list of pages, since the
vmalloc area is very limited on some architectures.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Johannes Berg