Chapter 32. The kdump Crash Recovery Service
When the
kdump crash dumping mechanism is enabled, the system is booted from the context of another kernel. This second kernel reserves a small amount of memory and its only purpose is to capture the core dump image in case the system crashes.
Being able to analyze the core dump significantly helps to determine the exact cause of the system failure, and it is therefore strongly recommended to have this feature enabled. This chapter explains how to configure, test, and use the
kdump service in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and provides a brief overview of how to analyze the resulting core dump using the crash debugging utility.
32.1. Installing the kdump Service
In order to use the
kdump service on your system, make sure you have the kexec-tools package installed. To do so, type the following at a shell prompt as root:
~]# yum install kexec-tools
For more information on how to install new packages in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, see Section 8.2.4, “Installing Packages”.
