Getting a guest dump
You can configure your guest and the watchdog vdev in its VM to dump the guest's state in the event of a crash.
This dump will provide you with the guest's state at the time that the watchdog intervened: the guest memory and its CPU registers (i.e., the vCPU registers in the hosting qvm process instance's vCPU threads).
To cause the guest to dump:
- In the guest, add a watchdog kicker (e.g., wdtkick) and configure it to kick the virtual watchdog in the VM at the appropriate intervals (see wdtkick in the QNX OS Utilities Reference).
- Add the appropriate watchdog vdev shared object to your hypervisor host's buildfile, and add the watchdog vdev to the hosting VM's configuration. QNX hypervisors include two watchdog vdevs: vdev wdt-sp805 (ARM) and vdev wdt-ib700 (x86).
- Configure the watchdog vdev to dump if the guest fails to kick it within the
specified time interval (see
Watchdogs
in theQNX Hypervisor: Protection Features
chapter). - In the configuration for the hosting VM, specify the dump
option so that it writes the hosted guest's dump to a file (see dump in the
VM Configuration Reference
chapter).
Alternatively, you can send a SIGUSR2 signal to the qvm process instance to cause the guest to dump. As with the watchdog method, to have the hosted guest's dump written to a file, you need the dump option specified appropriately in the hosting VM.
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