My "kdump" script (the script that runs as part of the initrd when a crash occurs) tries makedumpfile first, and if that fails, does a simple "cp /proc/vmcore /var/crash/vmcore". That copy always seems to succeed and is 4GB in size. I can run a check tomorrow to see how big /proc/vmcore appears to be, if this information is not sufficient. -Kevin ________________________________________ From: Ken'ichi Ohmichi [oomichi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 7:18 PM To: Worth, Kevin Cc: Masaki Tachibana; kexec-ml Subject: Re: Problems writing ELF dumps with makedumpfile 1.2.9 Hi Kevin, Worth, Kevin wrote: > I've attached the log files from running strace. > Hopefully they contain some clue as to where this failure is occurring. > I tried specifying -d30 and it still failed. Both traces attached. Thank you for some log files. vmcore-d30.log: open("/proc/vmcore", O_RDONLY) = 4 [snip] lseek(4, 2885288664, SEEK_SET) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) Your system has 4GB memory, and /proc/vmcore size is almost 4GB, right ? If yes, the above lseek() should *not* fail because the offset (almost 2.7GB) is in /proc/vmcore. So I guess that this problem is due to a kernel. Please try copying /proc/vmcore by `cp` command, and check whether the size of copied file is the same as /proc/vmcore. Thanks Ken'ichi Ohmichi