/sbin/kexec became zero size... Anyone else?

[Jay Lan]

Simon Horman wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 02:07:15PM -0700, Jay Lan wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> My root disk was populated with sles10sp2, but the kernel was
>> 2.6.27-rc5 and /sbin/kexec was built from 2.0.0 version.
>>
>> Many times when kdump kernel failed early i found  after reboot that
>> /sbin/kexec became zero size. There was no warning on executing
>> '/etc/init.d/kdump start' when /sbin/kexec is zero size. I have
>> no idea when and how that happened.
>>
>> Has anyone else seen this problem?
> 
> Is it possible that this is caused by filesystem corruption?

I found the problems, which i can not reliably reproduce, happened
when i ran into kdump kernel boot failure (yet not every time.)
What puzzled me was why only /sbin/kexec was affected.

I can not explain what caused it (otherwise i would be able to
reproduce it) and do not know where my finger should point to. ;)
The good news is since i fixed the kernel boot problem it has not
happened any more.

The distros probably can add a check against zero-sized kexec
in /etc/init.d/kdump script though.

Thanks,
 - jay