From Fedora Project Wiki

Description

Setup

  1. Prepare a server, no matter RHEL5/RHEL6/Fedora
  2. Install Fedora 17 on your machine
  3. After system installed, check if kexec-tools kernel-debuginfo and crash is installed via
    rpm -q kexec-tools kernel-debuginfo crash
    If not, you can install via yum
    yum install kexec-tools kernel-debuginfo crash
  4. Reserve crashkernel for kdump by grubby
    grubby --args="crashkernl=128M" --update-kernel=$(grubby --default-kernel)
    Reboot system and check /proc/cmdline
    cat /proc/cmdline | grep "crashkernel"
  5. Edit /etc/kdump.conf, add this line:
       net root@my.server.com
       path /var/crash
       core_collector makedumpfile -E -d 31
       link_delay 60 
  1. Apply changes and start kdump via
/usr/bin/kdumpctl propagate
/usr/bin/kdumpctl restart

How to test

  1. Trigger crash via:
    echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger
  2. Copy vmcore from server:
    scp -r root@my.server.com:/var/crash/ /var/crash
  3. Analyse vmcore:
     readelf -a /var/crash/xxx/vmcore
  4. Use crash to analyse vmcore:
        mount -t nfs my.server.com:/mnt/testarea/nfs /var/crash/
        crash -i crash-simple.cmd /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/xxx/vmlinux /var/crash/xxx/vmcore
        crash -i crash.cmd /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/xxx/vmlinux /var/crash/xxx/vmcore

Expected Results

  1. Dump process could be monitered if console is connected
  2. System reboot successfully after dump vmcore finshed
  3. vmcore was found on server
  4. No "warning" "warnings" found on readelf output
  5. No warning or error should be should found on crash output