debian's kdump-tools migration to systemd

[Louis Bouchard]

Hello everyone,

I understand that this is Thanksgiving weekend so not many american eyes will
see this but I still want to bounce the idea somewhere before uploading this to
Debian.

I recently realized that the kernel dump mechanism (kdump-tools) on debian was
broken, partly because of systemd and also because of a change of format of the
dmesg log.  The later is fixed upstream but systemd is another issue.

Debian uses a sysVinit script called kdump-tools that setup kexec and prepare
things in case of a kernel panic. To make sure that a systemd enabled system
does not reach multi-user when a kernel panic triggers kexec to load the new
kernel, I am adding the following boot parameter :

  systemd.unit=kdump-tools.service

The systemd kdump-tools.service unit calls the kdump-tools script that copies
the content of /proc/vmcore to local storage and then reboots the server.

The rest of the execution remain identical. Systems that will not be running
systemd will remain unchanged.

I would be happy to take comments and suggestion but keep in mind that I have
limited time until debian's final freeze which is dec 5th so I will proceed with
my debian upload before that.

Kind regards,

...Louis

-- 
Louis Bouchard
Software engineer, Cloud & Sustaining eng.
Canonical Ltd
Ubuntu developer                       Debian Maintainer
GPG : 429D 7A3B DD05 B6F8 AF63  B9C4 8B3D 867C 823E 7A61