So, first of all, a thanks to 8an that commented on my previous post suggesting me to limit the dimension of the memory to get a dump that is small enough to enter my current swap partition without need to buy an extra CF card. This solution didn’t pass in my mind before, so I used that one to start testing 🙂
Now, as Roy seems to have taken Daniel’s (dsd) place as drunken brit, I’ve looked up how to hook savecore(8) and dumpon(8) admin utilities into localmount, and prepared a bug report that contains the patch and a configuration file. I tested it out and it works nicely, the good part is that you can easily enable dump on a per-boot basis rather than having it always enabled by using dumpon directly, it will still save your core file if found.
So for the baselayout part I’m gold, the problem does not arise at all. More difficult is to get kgdb to work. As I supposed, there’s no way on earth that Mike will install libgdb for me (as upstream don’t seem to like that approach anyway, if I read correctly the documentation), so either I build a package that takes the FreeBSD sources and GDB itself, and builds a copy of GDB just to build kgdb(1),, which is not practical, not counting difficult to maintain over a long period (for instance, which versioning scheme should I use? GDB’s? FreeBSD’s?).
The only other thing that I’m left with is to fork kgdb, and try to make it a frontend to gdb itself, not by using the library calls, but by using the commandline interface of gdb, and commanding it from outside.
It might as well work, although I’ll have to talk with someone from FreeBSD as I doubt I would be able to keep it in sync alone. I see that obrien committed to at least two files in the 6.2_rc2 release, and he’s a nice guy, so I might have some hope for that 🙂
So I have to add “Make kgdb work as GDB master” to my TODO list, although I hope to find the cause of the misalignment before that time.
