Re: Linux kernel crash dumps for ARM

Paul Mundt
2010-01-05T08:49:06Z

On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 09:20:23PM -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Venkappa Mala <Venkappa.Mala@lntinfotech.com> writes:
> >
> > 2) As per kexec supports, kexec-tool is required and this allows you to load directly
> > to a new kernel from the currently running one
> >
> > As from my side, i am not able to find arm implementation support in kexec-tools/crash sources.
> >
> > - is kexce-tool supported for ARM or not?
> >
It would be rather counterintuitive for the kernel to support kexec and
the necessary userspace components not to.

The MAINTAINERS file says:

KEXEC
M: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
W: http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/horms/kexec-tools/
L: kexec@lists.infradead.org
S: Maintained
F: include/linux/kexec.h
F: kernel/kexec.c

While the above URL redirects to gitweb, resulting in:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/horms/kexec-tools.git;a=summary

A peripheral grep of the kexec-tools source results in:

$ git grep kdump | grep arm
kexec/arch/arm/kexec-arm.c: return 0; /* kdump is not supported on this platform (yet) */

So one could infer that kexec is supported on ARM whilst kdump is not. Adding
crashdump support requires both some kernel and kexec-tools glue, but is fairly
straightforward, just look at the other ports.