Kdump Testing

From: Nagesh Sharyathi
Date: Thu Apr 21 2005 - 08:57:09 EST


Hi,
I tested the kdump tool on x235 and x206 machines and found this problem
where on kernel Panic, system instead of booting into the panic kernel
jumps into BIOS and machine restarts.
(I have given the hardware specifications at the bottom of the mail)

Software:
- 2.6.12-rc2-mm1
- kexec-tools-1.101
- Five kdump user space patches
[http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=111201661400892&w=2]

Test Procedure:
- Built first kernel for 1M location with CONFIG_KEXEC enabled.
- Booted into first kernel with command line options crashkernel=48M@16M.
- Built second kernel for 16M location with CONFIG_CRASH_DUMP, and
CONFIG_PROC_VMCORE enabled.
- Loaded second kernel with following kexec command.

kexec -p vmlinux-16M --args-linux --crash-dump --append="root=<root-dev>
init 1"

- Inserted a module or echo into sysrq-trigger to invoke panic.
- System jumps into BIOS directly instead of booting into secondary
kernel.

Summary Observation:

- Earlier I was able to make kdump work on x330 machine by removing
maxcpus=1 (as specified in kdump.txt) option during loading panic kernel,
through kexec tool. But this work around doesn't seems to work with the
hardware x235 and x206. On kernel panic machine jumps to BIOS rather than
to panic kernel without displaying any error message.


HARDWARE SPECIFICATIONS
------------

A) Hardware x330:
- SMP, 2way, Pentium III (Coppermine) 1 GHz, 1.3G RAM
- Network Interface (e100)
- Disk I/O
SCSI storage controller: Adaptec Ultra160
-----------
B)Hardware x235
- SMP, 2way, Xeon TM 2.8GHz, 1.5g RAM
- Network Interface (Tigon3)
- Disk I/O
SCSI storage controller: IBM Serve RAID
-------------
C)Hardware x206
- SMP, 1way, Pentium IV 2.8GHz, 2g RAM
- Network Interface (e1000)
- Disk I/O
SCSI storage controller: Adaptec Ultra320

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