KernelTrap: Kernel Crash Dumps

“A kernel crash dump is a snapshot of system state taken at the
time that the kernel crashed, useful for finding and debugging the
problem that caused the crash in the first place. There is no
standard mechanism for automatiaclly collecting a crash dump on
Linux, but there are a number of existing projects working toward
efficiently meeting this goal. A ‘Linux Kernel Dump Summit’ was
recently mentioned on the lkml, with participants from some of the
many crash dump projects looking to standardize the dump process
and information collected. A followup email noted, ‘as memory size
grows, the time and space for capturing kernel crash dumps really
matter.’ It went on to examine partial dumps, and full dumps that
are compressed. The former risks not collecting information
necessary for proper debugging, while the latter risks greatly
increasing the amount of time required to collect a dump…”

Complete Story