Alternatives to serial console for capturing oopses

[Sam Varshavchik]

Eric Sandeen writes:

> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> nodata writes:
>> 
>>> Am Freitag, den 12.12.2008, 17:57 -0500 schrieb Sam Varshavchik:
>>>> I've got a quad-core dual x86_64 server that, so far, reproducably locks up 
>>>> under every 2.6.27 kernel released for F9 so far, when I run a build cycle. 
>>>> The last kernel that manages to survive under load is 2.6.26.6-79.fc9, so 
>>>> I'll continue to boot it until I get a 2.6.27 kernel that doesn't croak on 
>>>> me.
>>>>
>>>> Given that the hardware does not have a serial port, how else can I capture 
>>>> an oops, if one is being generated? At least I hope that there'll be an oops 
>>>> for me to capture.
>>>>
>>> Take a look at netdump.
>> 
>> Took a look.
>> 
>> 1) Only the server component is present in Fedora. There is no client. And, 
>> of course, I need the client.
> 
> I haven't used netdump for a while but:
> 
> http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/netdump/0.7.16/13/x86_64/
> 
> for example seems to have both.  *shrug*
> 
>> 2) The client package requires additional kernel modules to be built. If you 
>> are actually using netdump in Fedora, please explain how.
>> 
>> 3) netdump only supports a small set of NICs. netdump does not support my 
>> NIC.
> 
> anyway, how about kexec/kdump/crash?  Maybe with a little sysrq-C thrown
> in if it's not actually panicing?

Well, I boned up on the kexec/kdump/crash tools.

Immediately found a whole bunch of bugs in mkdumprd that produces a totally 
useless crash initrd image for me. I was able to fix some of the problems, 
but still don't have a workable crash image. Working on it.

Is anybody using kexec-tools on a *freshly* installed F9 (not an upgrade 
from earlier Fedoras) that uses RAID volumes? Did it work for you out of the 
box? As far as I can tell, it can't, because Anaconda no longer creates 
modules.conf for new installs, but mkinitrd figures out that the regular 
kernel boot images needs scsi_mod, sd_mod, and your hardware IDE/SATA/SCSI 
module, yet mkdumprd still looks for "alias scsi_hostadapter" in 
modules.conf, and without it you get a dumprd image without the necessary 
modules need to load scsi support. Even after I fixed that, I still don't 
get RAID to come up in the crash initrd image, not quite sure why.

Bug 476368.


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