18.3. Firmware assisted dump mechanisms on IBM Z hardware
IBM Z systems support the following firmware assisted dump mechanisms:
-
Stand-alone dump (sadump) -
VMDUMP
The kdump infrastructure is supported and utilized 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
sadumpmechanism, and stores it on anIPLbootable device. -
The
VMDUMPmechanism is similar tosadump. 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
kdumpservice starts. -
Although
VMDUMPcontains a mechanism to receive the dump file into a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, the configuration and control ofVMDUMPis managed from the IBM Z Hardware console.