Support newer kernels

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo]

[Impact]
Kernels newer than 5.4 cannot be analyzed using the crash tool from Focal.

[Test case]
Install a linux dbgsym package and run the command below, replacing vmlinux-5.11.0-1023-azure by the appropriate kernel debug file.

crash /usr/lib/debug/boot/vmlinux-5.11.0-1023-azure /proc/kcore

[Potential regression]
crash might fail to work with older kernels, or some of its commands might not work anymore.

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo (cascardo)]

Now building on ppa:cascardo/kdump2 for testing.

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo (cascardo)]

Notice the debdiff is against the version in impish (-release), which is also the current version in jammy.

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo (cascardo)]

Notice the debdiff is against the version in impish (-release).

[Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo (cascardo)]

This debdiff for focal is against the version in impish. Contrary to the previous version of the debdiff, this one builds fine on focal. The versioned dependency on debhelper was changed from >= 13 to >= 12, as debhelper 13 is not currently available on focal.

Cascardo.

[dann frazier (dannf)]

So it looks like the proposal here is to backport the impish version of crash back through focal, which means an upstream version bump. Resolving the issue in this way normally requires a documented special case to the SRU process[*], and I don't see one that includes the crash package.

I'd be supportive of such a special case for crash as this package usually needs updates to support new HWE kernels (same w/ makedumpfile) but, unless an ubuntu-sru-team members says differently, I think we need to go through that process first. Cascardo: would you mind drafting a special case page?

Alternatively, we could investigate if there's a more surgical way to add support for the desired kernels to the crash version already in focal.

[*] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Documentation_for_Special_Cases

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The Hirsute Hippo has reached End of Life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release.