kdump is an advanced crash dumping mechanism. When enabled, the system is booted from the context of another kernel. This second kernel reserves a small amount of memory and its only purpose is to capture the core dump image in case the system crashes. The ability to analyze the core dump significantly helps to determine the exact cause of the system failure, and as a consequence, it is strongly recommended to have this feature enabled.

This chapter explains how to configure, test, and use the kdump service in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and provides a brief overview of how to analyze the resulting core dump using the crash debugging utility.

~]# yum install kexec-tools