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

[Jay Lan]

Neil Horman wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 09:41:50AM -0700, Jay Lan wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> This is why most kdump implementations capture vmcore from an initramfs, since
> a crash means that you may not be able to trust the integrity of the filesystems
> that were mounted before the panic.
> 
> 
>> 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.
>>
> Theres really not a need to.  Filesystems can be corrupted by crashes, thats why
> we capture cores from the initrd.  We need to be able to trust the rest of the
> system to scan filesystems and do their best to recover when filsystems loose
> data.

Hi Neil,

Which rhel release starts doing this?

Thanks,
 - jay


> 
> Regards
> Neil
>  
>> Thanks,
>>  - jay
>>
>>
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>