At UDS we had a session about this [1] and I finally found some time to write up that mail I really wanted to come up with a bit sooner...
So right now the kernel-team produces the linux-crashdump meta-package will will pull in kexec-tools and makedumpfile. The kexec-tools package contains some init scripts which will create an apport crash report from the memory dump taken by the kexec-crash run and submits it. For various reasons (see blueprint) we would like to move to use kdump-tools and remove everything related to create dump files from kexec-tools. So that package only provides means to use kexec. Beside other changes this will initially cause the apport crash reports no longer to be produced. But then the general question was: do we really want them to be what they are today? If I have not understood this wrong, we send several megabytes of memory dump out, then on our side pull in even more megabytes of kernel debug packages to look at the panic trace which comes from the dmesg buffer which is only a tiny part of the core file. So one outcome I would like to get from this discussion is to understand better what parts and how exactly those memory dump reports are used. I think apport will ask about sending it but not sure whether is tells you that "by the way this is 20MB of data and may contain sensitive information". I doubt the average user really wants this, let alone business users. My rough idea of how this could look in the end would be: - we remove the dump functionality from kexec-tools - we replace the kexec-tools dependency in linux-crashdump with kdump-tools - kdump-tools would by default produce dumps but no reports (this probably needs some thoughts about where to place those and how to make sure they don't overflow the fs). - we can figure out a way to extract information we need for reports locally and then only report things with as little data as possible (maybe require a setting to enable this). Does this sound sensible? What have I missed? -Stefan PS: Reminds me of the kerneloops package which was intended to report oopses and certain warnings from the dmesg (and despite its name not to the kerneloops.org site anymore), which I think is broken right now. But thats probably another discussion... [1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/servercloud-r-kdump-tool
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