18장. Firmware assisted dump mechanisms

The fadump utility captures the vmcore file from a fully-reset system with PCI and I/O devices. This mechanism uses firmware to preserve memory regions during a crash and then reuses the kdump userspace scripts to save the vmcore file. The memory regions consist of all system memory contents, except the boot memory, system registers, and hardware Page Table Entries (PTEs).

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/kdump-utils/fadump-howto.txt file.

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.