Crash Dump Analysis

Suppose we got a kernel, complete or minidump from Windows running under Xen hypervisor. How would we distinguish it from a memory dump of Windows running on non-virtualized hardware? We can check machine id:

kd> !sysinfo machineid
Machine ID Information [From Smbios 2.4, DMIVersion 36, Size=348]
BiosMajorRelease = 3
BiosMinorRelease = 1
BiosVendor = Xen
BiosVersion = 3.1.0
SystemManufacturer = Xen
SystemProductName = HVM domU
SystemVersion = 3.1.0

and drivers:

kd> lm m *xen*
start end module name
f6012000 f605f000 dump_xenvbd (deferred)
f794b000 f795c000 xennet (deferred)
f82c0000 f830d000 xenvbd (deferred)
f845f000 f846b000 XENUTIL (deferred)
f84cf000 f84db000 dump_XENUTIL (deferred)

Note: similar information can be checked for VMWare and Virtual PC.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

New Book Memory Dump Analysis Anthology, Volume 1

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Citrix, Crash Dump Analysis, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.