RHEA-2005:263 - Product Enhancement Advisory

Topic

An updated netdump package that has a signficantly faster diskdumpfmt
utility and also fixes several bugs is now available.

Description

The diskdump utilities set up the kernel to save memory image to a
specified partition.

The diskdumputils package serves as an alternative to the netdump
facility that have disk host adapters controlled by the aic7xxx, aic79xx,
dpt_i2o, megaraid2, mptfusion, sym53c8xx, sata_promise and ata_piix drivers.

This update contains several minor bug fixes primarily in respect to its
build procedure. The primary change is to the diskdumpfmt command, which is
now significantly faster in this release. In prior releases, each 4096-byte
block was written to. With this release, the disk is formatted according to
the sample_rate and block_order parameters that are passed to the diskdump
module. For example, using the default parameters, the sample_rate is 8,
and the block_order is 2:

$ modprobe diskdump
$ cat /proc/diskdump
# sample_rate: 8
# block_order: 2
# fallback_on_err: 1
# allow_risky_dumps: 1
# total_blocks: 262042
#
sda1 63 2168712
$

The sample_rate and block_order values are explained in the enclosed README
file, but values of 8 and 2 respectively would make the diskdumpfmt command
access the disk at every 4 megabyte offset.

All users of diskdumputils should upgrade to this updated package, which
resolves these issues.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure that all previously-released
errata relevant to your system have been applied. Use Red Hat
Network to download and update your packages. To launch the Red Hat
Update Agent, use the following command:

up2date

For information on how to install packages manually, refer to the
following Web page for the System Administration or Customization
guide specific to your system:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/

Affected Products

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 ia64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 3 i386
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 x86_64
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 3 i386

Fixes

• BZ - 132872 - diskdumputils has missing build requirements
• BZ - 136147 - local variable used before set
• BZ - 143202 - function declared but never referenced
• BZ - 148998 - Use glib 2.x instead of glib 1.x

CVEs

(none)

References

(none)