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Chapter 19. Firmware assisted dump mechanisms

Firmware-assisted dump (fadump) provides an alternative to kdump for capturing core dumps on IBM POWER systems. By using onboard firmware, fadump isolates memory regions to prevent data overwrites during crashes. The resulting dump is accurate where standard kdump might fail.

19.1. Firmware assisted dump on IBM PowerPC hardware
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Capture vmcore files on IBM PowerPC systems using the fadump utility. This mechanism uses firmware to preserve memory regions during a crash, reusing kdump scripts to save data from a fully reset system while excluding boot memory and registers.

The fadump mechanism offers improved reliability over the traditional dump type, by rebooting the partition and using a new kernel to dump the data from the previous kernel crash. The fadump requires an IBM POWER6 processor-based or later version hardware platform.

For further details about the fadump mechanism, including PowerPC specific methods of resetting hardware, see the /usr/share/doc/kexec-tools/fadump-howto.txt file.

Note

The area of memory that is not preserved, known as boot memory, is the amount of RAM required to successfully boot the kernel after a crash event. By default, the boot memory size is 256MB or 5% of total system RAM, whichever is larger.

Unlike kexec-initiated event, the fadump mechanism uses the production kernel to recover a crash dump. When booting after a crash, PowerPC hardware makes the device node /proc/device-tree/rtas/ibm.kernel-dump available to the proc filesystem (procfs). The fadump-aware kdump scripts, check for the stored vmcore, and then complete the system reboot cleanly.

19.2. Enabling firmware assisted dump mechanism
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You can enhance the crash dumping capabilities of IBM POWER systems by enabling the firmware assisted dump (fadump) mechanism.

In the Secure Boot environment, the GRUB boot loader allocates a boot memory region, known as the Real Mode Area (RMA). The RMA has a size of 512 MB, divided among the boot components. If a component exceeds its size allocation, GRUB fails with an out-of-memory (OOM) error.

Warning

Do not enable firmware assisted dump (fadump) mechanism in the Secure Boot environment on RHEL 8.7 and 8.6 versions. The GRUB2 boot loader fails with the following error: 

error: ../../grub-core/kern/mm.c:376:out of memory.
Press any key to continue…
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The system is recoverable only if you increase the default initramfs size due to the fadump configuration.

For information about workaround methods to recover the system, see the System boot ends in GRUB Out of Memory (OOM) article.

Procedure

  1. Install and configure kdump.

  2. Enable the fadump=on kernel option: 

    # grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="fadump=on"
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  3. Optional: If you want to specify reserved boot memory instead of using the defaults, enable the crashkernel=xxM option, where xx is the amount of the memory required in megabytes: 

    # grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="crashkernel=xxM fadump=on"
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    Important

    When specifying boot configuration options, test all boot configuration options before you run them. If the kdump kernel fails to boot, increase the value specified in crashkernel= argument gradually to set an appropriate value.

19.3. Firmware assisted dump mechanisms on IBM Z hardware
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IBM Z systems support the Stand-alone dump (sadump) and VMDUMP firmware assisted dump mechanisms.

The kdump infrastructure is supported and used on IBM Z systems. However, using one of the firmware assisted dump (fadump) methods for IBM Z has the following benefits:

  • The system console initiates and controls the sadump mechanism, and stores it on an IPL bootable device.
  • The VMDUMP mechanism is similar to sadump. This tool is also initiated from the system console, but retrieves the resulting dump from hardware and copies it to the system for analysis.
  • These methods (similarly to other hardware based dump mechanisms) have the ability to capture the state of a machine in the early boot phase, before the kdump service starts.
  • Although VMDUMP contains a mechanism to receive the dump file into a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, the configuration and control of VMDUMP is managed from the IBM Z Hardware console.

19.4. Using sadump on Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST systems
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The Fujitsu sadump mechanism offers a fallback dump capture method when kdump fails. After configuring kdump for your server, enable sadump to allow manual invocation through the Management Board (MMB) interface.

Procedure

  1. Add or edit the following lines in the /etc/sysctl.conf file to ensure that kdump starts as expected for sadump: 

    kernel.panic=0
kernel.unknown_nmi_panic=1
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    Warning

    In particular, ensure that after kdump, the system does not reboot. If the system reboots after kdump has failed to save the vmcore file, then it is not possible to invoke the sadump.

  2. Set the failure_action parameter in /etc/kdump.conf appropriately as halt or shell. 

    failure_action shell
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