Analyzing crash dumps

When the CPU detects an instruction that it cannot execute it raises an interrupt. U-Boot then writes a crash dump. This chapter describes how such dump can be analyzed.

Creating a crash dump voluntarily

For describing the analysis of a crash dump we need an example. U-Boot comes with a command ‘exception’ that comes in handy here. The command is enabled by:

CONFIG_CMD_EXCEPTION=y

The example output below was recorded when running qemu_arm64_defconfig on QEMU:

=> exception undefined
"Synchronous Abort" handler, esr 0x02000000
elr: 00000000000101fc lr : 00000000000214ec (reloc)
elr: 000000007ff291fc lr : 000000007ff3a4ec
x0 : 000000007ffbd7f8 x1 : 0000000000000000
x2 : 0000000000000001 x3 : 000000007eedce18
x4 : 000000007ff291fc x5 : 000000007eedce50
x6 : 0000000000000064 x7 : 000000007eedce10
x8 : 0000000000000000 x9 : 0000000000000004
x10: 6db6db6db6db6db7 x11: 000000000000000d
x12: 0000000000000006 x13: 000000000001869f
x14: 000000007edd7dc0 x15: 0000000000000002
x16: 000000007ff291fc x17: 0000000000000000
x18: 000000007eed8dc0 x19: 0000000000000000
x20: 000000007ffbd7f8 x21: 0000000000000000
x22: 000000007eedce10 x23: 0000000000000002
x24: 000000007ffd4c80 x25: 0000000000000000
x26: 0000000000000000 x27: 0000000000000000
x28: 000000007eedce70 x29: 000000007edd7b40

Code: b00003c0 912ad000 940029d6 17ffff52 (e7f7defb)
Resetting CPU ...

resetting ...

The first line provides us with the type of interrupt that occurred. On ARMv8 a synchronous abort is an exception thrown when hitting an unallocated instruction. The exception syndrome register ESR register contains information describing the reason for the exception. Bit 25 set here indicates that a 32 bit instruction led to the exception.

The second line provides the contents of the elr and the lr register after subtracting the relocation offset. - U-Boot relocates itself after being loaded. - The relocation offset can also be displayed using the bdinfo command.

After the contents of the registers we get a line indicating the machine code of the instructions preceding the crash and in parentheses the instruction leading to the dump.

Analyzing the code location

We can convert the instructions in the line starting with ‘Code:’ into mnemonics using the objdump command. To make things easier scripts/decodecode is supplied:

$echo 'Code: b00003c0 912ad000 940029d6 17ffff52 (e7f7defb)' | \
  CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu- ARCH=arm64 scripts/decodecode
Code: b00003c0 912ad000 940029d6 17ffff52 (e7f7defb)
All code
========
   0:   b00003c0     adrp   x0, 0x79000
   4:   912ad000     add    x0, x0, #0xab4
   8:   940029d6     bl     0xa760
   c:   17ffff52     b      0xfffffffffffffd54
  10:*  e7f7defb     .inst  0xe7f7defb ; undefined <-- trapping instruction

Code starting with the faulting instruction
===========================================
   0:   e7f7defb     .inst  0xe7f7defb ; undefined

Now lets use the locations provided by the elr and lr registers after subtracting the relocation offset to find out where in the code the crash occurred and from where it was invoked.

File u-boot.map contains the memory layout of the U-Boot binary. Here we find these lines:

.text.do_undefined
               0x00000000000101fc        0xc cmd/built-in.o
.text.exception_complete
               0x0000000000010208       0x90 cmd/built-in.o
...
.text.cmd_process
               0x00000000000213b8      0x164 common/built-in.o
               0x00000000000213b8                cmd_process
.text.cmd_process_error
               0x000000000002151c       0x40 common/built-in.o
               0x000000000002151c                cmd_process_error

So the error occurred at the start of function do_undefined() and this function was invoked from somewhere inside function cmd_process().

If we want to dive deeper, we can disassemble the U-Boot binary:

$ aarch64-linux-gnu-objdump -S -D u-boot | less

00000000000101fc <do_undefined>:
{
        /*
         * 0xe7f...f.   is undefined in ARM mode
         * 0xde..       is undefined in Thumb mode
        */
        asm volatile (".word 0xe7f7defb\n");
   101fc:       e7f7defb        .inst   0xe7f7defb ; undefined
        return CMD_RET_FAILURE;
}
10200:       52800020        mov     w0, #0x1        // #1
10204:       d65f03c0        ret

This example is based on the ARMv8 architecture but the same procedures can be used on other architectures as well.