Chapter 18. Supported kdump configurations and targets

For kdump to capture a kernel crash dump and save it for further analysis, a part of the system memory should be permanently reserved for the capture kernel. When reserved, this part of the system memory is not available to the main kernel.

The memory requirements vary based on certain system parameters. One of the major factors is the system’s hardware architecture. To find out the exact machine architecture (such as Intel 64 and AMD64, also known as x86_64) and print it to standard output, use the following command:

$ uname -m

With the stated list of minimum memory requirements, you can set the appropriate memory size to automatically reserve a memory for kdump on the latest available versions. The memory size depends on the system’s architecture and total available physical memory.

On many systems, kdump is able to estimate the amount of required memory and reserve it automatically. This behavior is enabled by default, but only works on systems that have more than a certain amount of total available memory, which varies based on the system architecture.

The kexec-tools utility, by default, configures the crashkernel command line parameter and reserves a certain amount of memory for kdump. On some systems however, it is still possible to allocate memory for kdump either by using the crashkernel=auto parameter in the boot loader configuration file, or by enabling this option in the graphical configuration utility. For this automatic reservation to work, a certain amount of total memory needs to be available in the system. The memory requirement varies based on the system’s architecture. If the system memory is less than the specified threshold value, you must configure the memory manually.

When a kernel crash occurs, the operating system saves the dump file on the configured or default target location. You can save the dump file either directly to a device, store as a file on a local file system, or send the dump file over a network. With the following list of dump targets, you can know the targets that are currently supported or not supported by kdump.

To reduce the size of the dump file, kdump uses the makedumpfile core collector to compress the data and also exclude unwanted information, for example, you can remove hugepages and hugetlbfs pages by using the -8 level. The levels that makedumpfile currently supports can be seen in the table for Filtering levels for `kdump` .

By default, when kdump fails to create a core dump, the operating system reboots. You can, however, configure kdump to perform a different operation in case it fails to save the core dump to the primary target.

When kdump succeeds or if kdump fails to save the vmcore file at the configured target, you can perform additional operations like reboot, halt, and poweroff by using the final_action parameter. If the final_action parameter is not specified, reboot is the default response.

The failure_action parameter specifies the action to perform when a dump fails in the event of a kernel crash. The default action for failure_action is reboot, which reboots the system.

The parameter recognizes the following actions to take: