2012-02-15 04:22:27

by Paul Mackerras

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v6 00/10] fadump: Firmware-assisted dump support for Powerpc.

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 12:19:59PM +0530, Mahesh J Salgaonkar wrote:

> The most of the code implementation has been adapted from phyp assisted dump
> implementation written by Linas Vepstas and Manish Ahuja.

When you repost the series, please be explicit about what the
relationship between the new fadump facility and the old phyp-dump
is, both in the documentation you're adding and in the patch
descriptions.

I gather that fadump uses the same firmware interfaces as phyp-dump,
and can be characterised as a rewrite of phyp-dump. It would be good
if you would explicitly mention:

- What advantages fadump has over phyp-dump
- Whether there are any capabilities that phyp-dump does that fadump
doesn't
- What is different between fadump and phyp-dump in the interface to
usermode code
- Any user-visible differences between how fadump operates compared to
phyp-dump. For example, will users see a difference in how much
memory is available to the kernel?

Paul.