Re: kdump in dracut

[Thomas Renninger <trenn-l3A5Bk7waGM@public.gmane.org>]

On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 11:41:32 AM WANG Chao wrote:
> CC Vivek, Bao
> 
> On 02/17/14 at 04:10pm, Thomas Renninger wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > it looks like Redhat has made up their own kdump dracut module
> > in the kexec-tools Fedora package:
> > http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/kexec-tools.git/tree/
> > 
> > dracut-kdump.sh
> > dracut-module-setup.sh
> > dracut-monitor-dd-progress.sh
> > 
> > I wonder whether there are any plans to get those into the
> > dracut mainline git repository.
> 
> Hi, Thomas
> 
> AFAICT, we don't have any plan to move these files into dracut.
> We want to maintain these files separately, because kdump initrd serves
> for a different purpose comparing to a normal initrd created by dracut
> by default. Basically we are reusing the dracut framework to achieve our
> own purpose (kdump).
"Own" purpose sounds strange. Kdump is something every distribution has
or should have.
I also do not understand the "kdump initrd serves for a different purpose"
argue.
Dracut is made to build an initrd for any purpose?
 
> > Otherwise we (SUSE) and others will have to come up with our
> > own implementations and we are where we do not want to end up:
> > Different initrd implementations, setups, configurations across
> > Linux distributions.
> 
> This kdump module is highly associated with other scripts we provide in
> our kexec-tools package. What's the worse is that some parts are
> hardcoded for Fedora.

That's bad.
The stuff should (at least in dracut git repo) be compatible with:
ftp://kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/kexec
https://sourceforge.net/projects/makedumpfile
and other mainline projects.
We also had some specialities implemented in our mkinitrd solution.
But it should not be hard to put a basic dracut kdump module together
which is compatible.
 
> Thank you for bringing this up. It's really not my call. I'd like to
> hear from others in our team. And an ACK from Harald is also a must.
Sure.

Thanks,

       Thomas