Hi everyone, I'm running Fedora 8, kernel 2.6.24.3-50.fc8. I was experiencing frequent kernel hangs, so to get to the bottom of it I setup kexec/ kdump with this kernel. I did it according to the documentation in <kernel_src>/Documentation/ kdump/kdump.txt. I'm running Xorg with the closed-source binary nvidia driver. I did the following: 1) Ensured that my running kernel supported kexec (as given in the documentation above), obtained the vmlinux for it from the fedora debug yum repos. 2) Built a new crash-dump kernel (linux-2.6.23.17-kdump). 3) Appended the following lines to my /etc/rc.sysinit: 921 echo "1" > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq 922 savetextmode 923 # Tell kexec which kernel and ramdisk to use 924 kexec -p /usr/src/kernels/linux-2.6.23.17/vmlinux --initrd=/boot/ initrd-2.6.23.17-kdump.img --args-linux --append="root=LABEL=/ 1 irqpoll maxcpus=1" 925 926 DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d-%T` 927 NAME=`uname -r` 928 if [ "$NAME" == "2.6.23.17-kdump" ]; then 929 echo -e "Creating crash dump..\n" 930 mkdir -p /var/crash/127.0.0.1-$DATE 931 cp /proc/vmcore /var/crash/127.0.0.1-$DATE/vmcore-incomplete 932 if [ $? == 0 ] 933 then 934 mv /var/crash/127.0.0.1-$DATE/vmcore-incomplete /var/crash/ 127.0.0.1-$DATE/vmcore 935 echo -e "Done, rebooting..\n" 936 reboot -f 937 fi 938 fi The above is supposed to dump the vmcore to my /var/crash/ directory as soon as the kdump kernel boots after a hang. The motivation for doing this was that I get kernel hangs while running X, and pressing <Alt>+<Sysrq> causes the screen to get garbled when the kdump kernel boots, so I don't have a chance of doing this manually. I've tested the above while in runlevel 3 while I'm inside a VT, everything works as expected (I see the kdump kernel boot up and copy the kdump), and I can see the vmcore end up inside /var/crash/. But when I try the same while X is running, the screen gets garbled while the kdump kernel boots, but nothing happens! The kernel does not reboot, and neither does it copy the vmcore to /var/crash. It is responsive though, I can toggle the CapsLock key, but the screen is blank. Is it something in the nvidia driver that's causing this to not work? Any clues on what's going wrong, or how I can debug this further? (Please CC me in the reply, I'm not on this list) Thanks! -Mayank -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/kexec/attachments/20091129/0a2c0e55/attachment.htm>
