Kdump Automation Mechanism

[Bernhard Walle]

* Neil Horman [2008-08-14 08:18]:
> 
> 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?

I have nothing against consideration in that area.

SUSE does configuration in /etc/sysconfig/kdump. I think sysconfig is
also on RedHat, so that is the same?

> > [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?

For kdump, an own initramfs is built. That does the copy stuff in
initramfs, so that works without rootfs and reboots before init is
executed.

So the 'copy' script is not the init script but “init/boot-kdump.sh”
script if you “hg clone http://freehg.org/u/bwalle/kdump/”.
Unfortunately, freehg has no tree view in its web interface.

Having that said, for testing one must do:

 - install packages
   SUSE:
   o kexec-tools
   o kdump
   o makedumpfile
   RH: ?

 - set crashkernel parameter
   => can be done with GRUB configuration manually with editing
      /boot/grub/menu.lst, should be the same on RH and SUSE

 - enable kdump (that would be “chkconfig kdump on”)
   => should be the same on RH and SUSE

 - tweak some configuration settings like the place where it should be
   saved
   => KDUMP_SAVEDIR in /etc/sysconfig/kdump
   => KDUMP_DUMPLEVEL for makedumpfile in /etc/sysconfig/kdump
   => KDUMP_DUMPFORMAT (“compressed” / “ELF” / “”)
      in /etc/sysconfig/kdump

 - trigger kdump
   => echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger

Most other stuff is “nice to have” but not “mandatory” I think?



Bernhard
-- 
Bernhard Walle, SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Architecture Development

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