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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