Kdump Automation Mechanism

[Neil Horman]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 10:17:20AM +0200, Bernhard Walle wrote:
> * 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.
> 

Agreed.  It would be great if we could get some common testing infrastructure,
but currently the the implementation of kdump functionality is completely
non-standard.  Theres just too many things the people want kdump to be able to
do, and too many ways to get there.

That being said, Bernhard, I suppose it would be worthwhile standardizing some
configuration settings, seeing as despite our implementation differences, we
seem to largely support the same feature set.  Have you given any consideration
to defining a standard kdump feature set and configuration syntax?

> 
> 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
I was looking at this, I assume that your initramfs then acts very simmilar to
your default initramfs, which mounts the rootfs and runs init, and your kdump
capture operations are then implemented in the kdump init script.  Is that
correct?

Neil

> -- 
> Bernhard Walle, SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Architecture Development
> 
> “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
>        -- Albert Einstein
> 
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-- 
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 *Neil Horman
 *Senior Software Engineer
 *Red Hat, Inc.
 *nhorman at redhat.com
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