Re: Determine version of kernel that produced vmcore

[Dan Aloni <da-x@monatomic.org>]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 01:17:40PM -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 08:30:37PM +0530, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > I am still thinking that why can't we change initrd building process
> > (Be it mkinitrd or mkdumprd depending on distriution). Whole idea is
> > that while building an initrd/initramfs for the first kernel, one will
> > ask user for kdump kernel (if user wishes to load kdump kenrel through
> > initrd) and then it will generate kdump kenrel's initrd and pack into
> > first kernel's initrd.
> > 
> > So steps would look something like this.
> > 
> > - mkinitrd takes second kernel's vmlinux as argument
> > - mkinitrd runs "makedumpfile -g" on debug version of first kernel's vmlinux.
> > - mkinitrd generates the initramfs for kdump kernel and packs output
> >   of "makedumpfile -g" into that.
> > - mkinitrd packs statically linked kexec, kdump kernel vmlinux/bzImage,
> >   and kdump kernel initramfs into first kernel's initramfs.
> > 
> Agreed, this is exactly what happens right now.

Isn't there some sort of a circular dependency going on here? As I 
understand it the vmlinux binary already contains the initramfs as 
built-in data (at least that's what I use here for initramfs). It 
makes more sense if you guys are creating an _initrd_ image (that's 
what mkinitrd originally did AFAIK) and supply it to the boot-loader.

-- 
Dan Aloni
XIV LTD, http://www.xivstorage.com
da-x (at) monatomic.org, dan (at) xiv.co.il