Monitoring and Troubleshooting

This chapter describes some tools and techniques you can use to monitor and troubleshoot your hypervisor system.

The QHS and other QNX hypervisors are a QOS microkernel (QHS) or QNX Neutrino OS microkernel, plus a virtualization extension. This means that QNX hypervisors have all the QNX Neutrino OS's debugging, monitoring, and troubleshooting capabilities. All the tools (QNX Momentics IDE, command line, third-party), and techniques available for working with the QNX Neutrino OS are also available to you when you are working with a QNX hypervisor host, or QOS or QNX Neutrino OS guests. For Linux guests, use your Linux tools (GDB TraceCompass, etc.).

Troubleshooting strategies

There are numerous ways to get information about the different parts of your hypervisor system. These include:

For guests, use the same debugging tools you would use for the OS and its applications in a non-virtualized system (running directly on the hardware).
Use the qvm debug option (see debug in the “VM Configuration Reference” chapter).
Add the logger to the qvm configuration (see logger in the “VM Configuration Reference” chapter).
Use GDB (see “Using a GNU debugger (GDB)”).
Use tracelogging (see “Getting hypervisor trace information”).

A typical approach to troubleshooting would be to use the qvm logger option to gather general information about what a qvm process is doing (and, by indirection, what a guest is doing), then to use GDB and tracelogging for more detailed analysis.

If you need to keep more than the default 4K of slog information kept by the hypervisor, you can use the set option's slog-buffer argument to change the buffer size (see slog-buffer in the “VM Configuration Reference” chapter). You can also send your output to your console.

Note: For information about how to handle situations where a server doesn't respond to an unblock pulse see server-monitor in the QNX Neutrino Utilities Reference.