No Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD) love for Ubuntu

I had a machine that was crashing (kernel panic) due to what I believe was a buggy network card. In order to keep the machine running I set it to reboot on kernel panic. Of course, in doing so all information about what caused the kernel panic was erased. I figured there must be a way to preserve that information, and there is. Unfortunately you cannot easily use it with Ubuntu at this time.

It’s called Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD) and its purpose is to save crash dump information for analysis. IT requires patching the kernel and this patch has not been applied to the Ubuntu Linux kernels nor is it readily available as a kernel-patch package. There are 2 other packages, crash and dumputils, that can be used with a properly patched kernel. I toyed with the idea of patching the kernel myself but I’d really rather see this adopted by Ubuntu in the future. It is currently slated as a goal for Ubuntu 8.04 and hopefully it will make it.

• Linux should dump kernel panics to disk
• http://lkcd.sourceforge.net/
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Crash-HOWTO/

crash

The core analysis suite is a self-contained tool that can be used to investigate either live systems, LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dumps) and Red Hat Netdump and Diskdump core dumps.

For complete LKCD crash dump support you will need the LKCD kernel patch, dumputils, and a debugger that can be used to analyze the crash, such as the “lcrash” or “crash” (this package) packages.

dumputils

Facilitates the integration of LKCD (Linux Kernel Crash Dump) into the operating system by providing user space utilities that: 1. Configure and enable crash dumps by managing the LKCD kernel component 2. Retrieving dumps from the LKCD dump partition, and saves them to the local file system or a ftp server.

For complete LKCD crash dump support you will need the LKCD kernel
patch (“kernel-patch-lkcd”), “dumputils” (this package), and a
debugger that can be used to analyze the crash such as the “lcrash”
or “crash” packages.