kernel panic

[tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org (Tom Metro)]

Jarod Wilson wrote:
> Tom Metro wrote:
>> My recollection is that the only way to
>> capture the output of a kernel panic is to capture the output of the
>> serial console. Is that still true?
> 
> No. There have been other ways for quite some time.

Ah, good.


> The most common upstream-supported way is kdump...

I ran across that, but the main page described it as a set of patches,
and didn't give the impression that it had been incorporated into any
distributions.

If this is a practical option, I'll dig deeper and see if I can turn up
a guide for using it with an Ubuntu kernel.

There are no Ubuntu (9.10) packages for kdump, kmsg_dump, or kmsgdump or
packages containing those substrings. (While these tools mainly reside
in the kernel, there still should be some user space tools in a separate
package, I assume.) Although I guess Ubuntu's kexec-tools might just be
the patched version.


> ...which collects an entire vmcore...that can be analyzed.

How does it record that?


> There's also kmsg_dump now, which can output the kernel message
> buffer (including the panic trace) to RAM, flash, or other target,
> when appropriately configured. Its fairly new upstream though, so it 
> may or may not be in the kernel you're running.

This sounds more like what I want, but less likely to be something I can
get to work.

How would I determine if the kernel I have supports it?

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/