Another day, another kenel panic

Been trying to get verified exec on NetBSD to work correctly at the page level. I have worked on this off and on for quite a while. I did have it working fine but, unfortunately, it relied on all the filesystems calling genfs_getpages() which does not happen. I have shifted the code into the uvm getpages call but now when I force a modified page detection and try to repeat the test things seem to fall apart, pages get flagged as being modified when they are not and sometimes the kernel panics in genfs_putpages(), unfortunately the kernel core from this panic does not show much, I suspect that the cause of the panic is well in the past and it is just UVM tripping over something bad I have done to it or something I have omitted to do.

I managed to clean up some bugs by compiling with DIAGNOSTIC set in the kernel config. I wanted to use UVMHIST and UVMHIST_PRINT but the output they produce is way too verbose. I disabled the uvm history printing by tweaking the controlling variable with the idea that I would do the setup for my tests, tweak the uvm log printing on and then run the test. This plan has fallen apart somewhat because I am using the qemu machine emulator to provide me with a crashbox machine without requiring extra hardware which is always an advantage when you try hacking code during your daily commute to work on the train.

Qemu has actually worked very well for me, saved a lot of time by allowing me to keep my development environment running while the kernels panic in their qemu sandbox, it also means I don't put my file systems at risk when the kernel crashes. Making a backup of the qemu hard disk is a simple copy and I can just copy back the backup if the machine gets trashed. I can manipulate the qemu hard disk by using the vnd file-as-a-disk-image driver thing (vnode disk driver) to copy files to and from the qemu disk image so installing a new kernel or retrieving the kernel core dumps is quite easy, just a matter of a few short scripts to make life convenient. The only problem I have is that the keystrokes for generating keyboard events for "special" keys like dropping to ddb or changing virtual consoles are a mystery to me - the documented ones don't work - for example, ctrl-alt is supposed to release the focus from the qemu window after it has been locked there by clicking in the window. This does not seem to work and the quick look at the code for qemu I cannot see how they events can be generated in the sdl input handling code - just trying to use a special key combo like ctrl-alt-f1 changes the virtual console on the host machine not in qemu. I have put the question about this up on current-users@n.o, we shall see if there is an answer otherwise I shall just hack something in to qemu that will do what I want... ahhh the joys of having the source.