On Sun, 2012-06-10 at 00:44 -0700, John Wright wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 02, 2012 at 07:02:11PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > The help text for this option is:
> >
> > "Generate crash dump after being started by kexec.
> > This should be normally only set in special crash dump kernels
> > which are loaded in the main kernel with kexec-tools into
> > a specially reserved region and then later executed after
> > a crash by kdump/kexec. ..."
> >
> > Are you asking us to add a kdump flavour, as some other distributions
> > do?
>
> It's not necessary to have another flavor. Kernels built with this
> option work just fine as regular kernels too (in fact, the ia64 and
> probably some other kernels are already built this way). As I recall,
> as the kernel is currently built, it can be loaded as a crash kernel,
> and kexec'ed successfully upon kernel panic; however, CONFIG_CRASH_DUMP
> is required to enable /proc/vmcore in the newly booted kernel, which
> contains the memory of the crashed kernel. Then, a tool like
> 'makedumpfile' can read the core, stripping out user and zero pages, and
> write a small dump file that can be analyzed with tools like 'crash'.
The help text for CRASH_DUMP on x86 says:
Generate crash dump after being started by kexec.
This should be normally only set in special crash dump kernels
...
Since this is not the only use for kexec, I don't believe we should
enable this in the currently defined flavours (or that it should have
been enabled for ia64).
As I said, other distributions have a separate kdump flavour, presumably
for this reason.
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
The program is absolutely right; therefore, the computer must be wrong.
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