Research And Implementation Of Core Dump In RAID System

With the development of information technology, the information needed to storegrows exponentially, and data centers have mushroomed to establish. As the developmentof storage media and RAID technology, more and more RAID systems have been used indata center. And lots of enterprises develop their own RAID system software as a result ofpopularity of RAID. But the development work is very difficult, the RAID system ismulti-function, large-scale and hard to develop, as well as the debugging, maintenance andupgrades of the system are all very arduous. So a core dump software for RAID system isneeded to monitor the running status of RAID system in real time and offer help to debugand maintain the system.Above all, I analyzed the RAID controller software developed by my laboratory.After that I design and implement a core dump software and an analyzing programmatching it according to the structure characteristics of the RAID controller software. Thecore dump software and the analyzing program can do two things: first, it can monitor andview the running status of the RAID system in real time; second, it will copy the memoryimage to dump files by starting the core dump function when the RAID system runningabnormally, and then translate the dump files to text files which are easy to read by theanalyzing program. In this way, it helps debugging personnel positioning errors in thesystem. Then I introduce the design characteristics of the software from three aspectswhich are dump time, dump mechanism and dump content.At last, I give functional tests to the RAID core dump software, including real-timemonitoring test and thread abnormal test. The result show that the core dump softwareworks normally, completes the real-time monitoring function and system exceptiondebugging function. The dump files and text files can be created completely and correctly.And also I estimate the negative influence to RAID system brought by the core dump software, which show that the negative influence is so small to influence the normalrunning of the RAID system. When the core dump function is not working, only dumptiming detection module takes up CPU, this module is small, running regularly andbringing almost no influence to the system; If the core dump function is started, it onlycost300ms before finishing its task, and that the threads in RAID system are runningasynchronously, queues are used to cushion requests. So the core dump module also bringslittle effect to the RAID system.