Debugging Linux kernel using Kdump

Title: Debugging Linux kernel using Kdump

Authors: Vivek Goyal (vgoyal@in.ibm.com) Haren Myneni (haren@us.ibm.com) Dave Anderson (anderson@redhat.com)

Kdump is the first ever kernel crash dumping mechanism available in mainline Linux kernel. It is based on kexec, a kernel to kernel boot loader. As of now kdump is available for i386, x86_64 and ppc64 platforms. This tutorial starts with a brief overview of Kdump design and later covers the details of how to configure the system to capture the crash dump. A brief demonstration of how to analyze the generated crash dump image using "crash", a crash dump analysis tool from Red Hat, is also part of this tutorial. Participants are supposed to supply their own laptops (i386 or x86_64 based). They will configure the Kdump, simulate a crash and capture the dump image. Later they shall do the dump analysis using the "crash" tool to determine the problem source. The intended audience for this tutorial is system administrators and kernel developers who are interested in debugging a problem using crash dumps.