This patch set frees the restriction that makedumpfile users should install a
vmlinux file (including the debugging information) into each system.
makedumpfile command is the dump filtering feature for kdump. It creates a
small dumpfile by filtering unnecessary pages for the analysis. To
distinguish unnecessary pages, it needs a vmlinux file including the debugging
information. These days, the debugging package becomes a huge file, and it is
hard to install it into each system.
To solve the problem, kdump developers discussed it at lkml and kexec-ml. As
the result, we reached the conclusion that necessary information for dump
filtering (called "vmcoreinfo") should be embedded into the first kernel file
and it should be accessed through /proc/vmcore during the second kernel.
(http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0707.0/1806.html)
Dan Aloni created the patch set for the above implementation.
(http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0707.1/1053.html)
And I updated it for multi architectures and memory models.
(http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/kexec/2007-August/000479.html)
Signed-off-by: Dan Aloni <da-x@monatomic.org> Signed-off-by: Ken'ichi Ohmichi <oomichi@mxs.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: Bernhard Walle <bwalle@suse.de> Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>