http://lkcd.sourceforge.net/
Introduction - Linux Kernel Crash Dump
The Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD) project is designed to meet the
needs of customers and system administrators wanting a reliable method
of detecting, saving and examining system crashes. While more mature
operating systems have provided these capabilities by default for
years, Linux has yet to evolve to such a state. LKCD is an attempt to
move Linux towards greater supportability.
Kernel Crash Dump Requires Four Components:
- Kernel Support:
Kernel code for configuring dump parameters, catching error conditions,
and executing a kernel memory dump. Kernel.org kernels need to be
patched with the LKCD dump modules.
- Dump Configuration:
Facilities for integrating system crash dump capabilities into the
operating system. These facilities are in the form of user-level
applications to configure and enable crash dumps and various system
scripts necessary for incorporating LKCD into the operating system.
- Dump Recovery:
User-level commands to retrieve a dump saved by the kernel and transfer
it to a user accessible location.
- Dump Analysis:
A debugger that can operate on the saved dump image. The lkcdutils
package provides the lcrash command for dump analysis.
LKCD provides the all of the components (kernel and user level
code) designed to:
- Save the kernel memory image when the system dies due to a
software failure;
- Recover the kernel memory image when the system is rebooted;
- Analyze the memory image to determine what happened when the
failure occurred.
The memory image is stored into a dump device, which is represented
by one of the disk partitions on the system. That dump is recovered
with an application called lcrash (Linux Crash) once the system
boots back up, before the swap partitions are mounted. A report is
generated and saved into /var/log/dump.
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