[RFC Patch 5/6] slimdump: Capture slimdump for fatal MCE generated crashes

[Andi Kleen]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 01:44:47PM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:53:05PM +0530, K.Prasad wrote:
> > 
> > slimdump: Capture slimdump for fatal MCE generated crashes
> > 
> > System crashes resulting from fatal hardware errors (such as MCE) don't need
> > all the contents from crashing-kernel's memory. Generate a new 'slimdump' that
> > retains only essential information while discarding the old memory.
> > 
> 
> Why to enforce zeroing out of rest of the vmcore data in kernel. Why not
> leave it to user space. 

I think it's a good default to not do a full dump on MCE.
It's very unlikely to be useful for anything, and will just waste
reboot time (aka nines).

That said including the dmesg too may be a good idea.

On the other hand I think the slim dump should be probably generalized
and used for more situations. I could well imagine enabling it by
default on various systems.
 
-Andi