(Very timely! was just exploring kexec-tools and friends) On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 09:13:38PM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote: > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 02:49:54PM +0200, Ahmed S. Darwish wrote: > > > > If not, can kexec be modified to do so? That possibly needs the help > > of a a bootloader extension. > > - Generally kdump uses same kernel as first one. So if first kernel panics > then kdump kernel will also panic. Though one can keep a known good kdump > kernel. > I was thinking of a 'special' kdump kernel: the older kernel will just pass the physical RAM address of its ring buffer to the newer kernel. The newer kernel will be __so specialized__ that it will just: - display the log in a friendly manner - write it to the swap partition - .. and halt This way, I completely toss the BIOS while accomplishing similar goals. > > - Currently kexec-tools take care of loading the kdump kernel, and then > preparing memory map for second kernel and pass to it and also pass > along some information about vmcore in ELF headers to second kernel. > > There is so much to it that I really don't think that modifying bootloaders to > do all that might not trivial and more importantly I think it probably is not > worth the effort. > IMHO if done in a user-friendly and stable manner, it can really be worth the effort. But quite honestly, since I did not read all the setup work done by kexec-tools yet, I might be too optimistic. > Thanks > Vivek thanks, -- Darwish http://darwish.07.googlepages.com
