I plan to release an automated kdump testsuite that will be focus on testing kernel and the crash utility. It should work for all major distros since it will use none of distro-specific stuff, and also support different arches including x86, ARM, PPC64 and s390x. It does the following: 1) check if there is a memory reserved for kdump. If not, reserve the memory and reboot the system. 2) once the system is back, load kexec on panic and prepare a separate initramfs that including needed modules to load a local filesystem and necessary utilities in order to analyse /proc/vmcore in the 2nd kernel. 3) trigger the system crash using methods like sysrq-c, NMI, and panic_on_hung_task etc. 4) in the 2nd kernel, mount a filesystem and use the crash utility to analyse /proc/vmcore. Then, gather the analyse logs, serial console output, dmesg etc into the filesystem. 5) reboot back into the 1st kernel. implementation: It will setup a daemon to handle reboots. plan: I might also to test the makedumpfile all together later. CAI Qian