Using kdump
You can use kdump to create system dumps for instances of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.
Advantages of kdump
kdump offers these advantages over other dump methods:- While writing the dump, you can filter out extraneous pages and compress the dump, and so handle large dumps in a short time.
- When writing dumps over a network, you can use existing file system facilities to share dump space among multiple Linux instances without special preparations.
Shortcomings of kdump
kdump has these drawbacks:
- kdump cannot be used for issues that occur before kdump is initialized, for example, for early boot problems. For such problems, use a stand-alone dump tool for Linux on z/VM® and for Linux in LPAR mode. For Linux on KVM, use virsh dump instead.
- kdump is not as reliable as the stand-alone dump tools. For critical systems, you can set up stand-alone dump tools as a backup, in addition to the kdump configuration. For Linux on KVM, virsh dump can serve as the backup.
- For production systems that run in LPAR mode, kdump consumes memory.