Kdump Automation Mechanism

[Bernhard Walle]

* Cai Qian [2008-08-14 01:03]:
> 
> I am wondering if this is the right project to accept Kdump automation files. For example, Kdump
> daemon init script, mkdumprd (read from Kdump configuration file and generate Kdump initramfs for
> the system), default Kdump configuration file, tools to compress vmcore etc.
> 
> The problem I am having right now is that, I am trying to write a Kdump test suite, but I could
> not 
> find a easy way to write a general enough suite for every distro to use. Red Hat and SUSE have
> slightly different setting up. Debian and Ubuntu don't have Kdump automation mechanism as the time
> I was checking. Also, It make things much easier for different distros and users to pick it up and
> contribute to those efforts.

SLES 11 / openSUSE 11.1 (and later) scripts and tools are at
http://freehg.org/u/bwalle/kdump if you want to take a look at.

The problem is that kdump needs to be integrated into the distribution,
i.e. YaST configuration (vs. RedHat's configuration utilities),
mkinitrd from SUSE (vs. mkdumprd from RedHat [1]), BusyBox vs. GNU
tools.

For example, the reason why SUSE does not use Busybox in initramfs is
that we didn't want to provide additional support for Busybox.
That was a business decision, not because Busybox is not suited or
buggy (i.e. not strictly technical decision).

What I want to say: It's not always *that* easy to share everything
across distributions although I consider that in general as a good idea.


Bernhard

[1] mkdumprd on SUSE is only a script that calls mkinitrd with right
    parameters while the mkdumprd on RedHat builds a initramfs for
    kdump itself with busybox
-- 
Bernhard Walle, SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Architecture Development

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
       -- Albert Einstein