Analysing Kernel Dumps

[Safayet]

I'm trying to write a kernel module for a project. There are certain conditions under which the system freezes and shuts down. I noticed that there is a file (fairly large) under "/var/crash".

1) How do Ubuntu developers analyze kernel crash dumps as generated by kdump?

I have noticed that kdump and the "crash" utility are installed by default on Ubuntu 10.04. (even though the version of crash is a little old).

When I tried to analyze the "*.crash" file with "crash", providing the SystemMap file and the vmlinux file of the running kernel, I get an error that says something like:

/var/crash/linux-image-2.6.32-25-generic.0.crash: not a supported file format

2) What is the location of the configuration file for kdump?

I found very little documentation on how to deal with kdump files on Ubuntu. Any comments on how to go about analyzing these dumps would be helpful.

If this is the wrong thread, can you please point me to the right one? (new to the forum)

thanks in advance,

Safayet

[AbhiJais]

I'm trying to write a kernel module for a project. There are certain conditions under which the system freezes and shuts down. I noticed that there is a file (fairly large) under "/var/crash".

1) How do Ubuntu developers analyze kernel crash dumps as generated by kdump?

I have noticed that kdump and the "crash" utility are installed by default on Ubuntu 10.04. (even though the version of crash is a little old).

When I tried to analyze the "*.crash" file with "crash", providing the SystemMap file and the vmlinux file of the running kernel, I get an error that says something like:

/var/crash/linux-image-2.6.32-25-generic.0.crash: not a supported file format

2) What is the location of the configuration file for kdump?

I found very little documentation on how to deal with kdump files on Ubuntu. Any comments on how to go about analyzing these dumps would be helpful.

If this is the wrong thread, can you please point me to the right one? (new to the forum)

thanks in advance,

Safayet
Which version of vmlinux are you using for kernel crash? I think the reason of 'format not supported' error is version mismatch of vmlinux used by crash utility and kernel.