87b2ae9de63b7b1634fe8e588316efa67c2e29cc
So far, many changes were implemented to accommodate the upstreaming of the kdump/pstore tool, so let's hereby update the docs to match that effort. Signed-off-by: Guilherme G. Piccoli <gpiccoli@igalia.com>
# ###########################################################################
# ########################## Arch Kdump / Pstore ###########################
# ###########################################################################
#
#
# This is the Arch Kdump/Pstore infrastructure; the goal is to collect
# data whenever a kernel crash is detected. There is a lightweight
# collection, that only grabs dmesg, and a more complete setting to grab the
# whole (compressed) vmcore. See the DETAILS section below for more info.
#
#
# ############################ HOW-TO USE IT ##############################
#
# 1. Install the package with pacman if not available in your system; to check
# if it's already installed look the pacman installed package list. Also, be
# sure the systemd service was properly loaded by checking
# 'systemctl status kdump-init.service'.
#
# 2. In a crash event, the dmesg log is collected, and by default this happens
# via the Pstore mechanism, i.e., no extra memory should be reserved and no
# GRUB change is required. If 'lsmod' shows "ramoops", then Pstore is in use.
# Some extra files are collected besides dmesg, like dmidecode output and the
# "/etc/os-release" file.
#
# 3. The logs are stored in a ZIP file in the folder at "$MOUNT_FOLDER/logs"
# (see the config file); this file is named as: "kdump-TIMESTAMP.zip",
# where TIMESTAMP is the current timestamp (tz is UTC).
#
# 4. (IMPORTANT) Please, test the infrastructure in order to see if a dummy
# crash log is collected before using it to try debugging complex issues.
# In order to do that, login to a shell and execute, as root user:
# 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq ; echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger'
#
# This action will trigger a dummy crash and reboot the system; check if
# there is a ZIP file with the crash logs in the directory described in (3).
#
# 5. Various tunings are available at "/usr/share/kdump.d/*" files; for
# example, the users can choose Kdump instead of Pstore (USE_PSTORE_RAM),
# and if using Kdump, collect the full vmcore (FULL_COREDUMP). The vmcore is
# not stored in the ZIP file, but it's saved in "$MOUNT_FOLDER/crash".
# NOTICE that, if Kdump is used instead of Pstore (either per user's choice
# or due to some failure in Pstore), a reboot is necessary before kdump is
# usable, in order to effectively reserve crashkernel memory.
#
# 6. Error and succeeding messages are sent to systemd journal, so running
# 'journalctl -b | grep kdump' would hopefully bring some information.
#
#
# ############################## DETAILS ##################################
# CAVEATS / INSTRUCTIONS
# ###########################################################################
# (a) We automatically edit GRUB config in case Pstore fails or if the user's
# choice is to use Kdump. But it requires one reboot in order the crashkernel
# memory is effectively reserved by kernel.
#
# In case Kdump is used, the crashkernel necessary memory was empirically
# determined; setting 144M wasn't enough, 160M is unstable, so 192M seems
# good enough. This amount might change in future kernel versions, requiring
# tests using the approach suggested in the step (4) above.
#
#
# TODOs
# ###########################################################################
# * Would be interesting to have a clean-up mechanism, to keep up to N most
# recent ZIP log files, instead of keeping all of them forever.
#
# * Pstore ramoops back-end has some limitations that we're discussing with
# the kernel community - right now we can only collect ONE dmesg and its
# size is truncated on "record_size" bytes, not allowing a file split like
# efi-pstore; thankfully we still can collect 2MiB dmesg, but hopefully we can
# improve that upstream.
#
# * Add a more reliable reboot mechanism - we had seen issues in the past
# with "reboot -f", and relying in sysrq reboot as a quirk managed to be a safe
# option, so this is something to think about. Should be easy to implement.
#
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Fork of https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gpiccoli/kdumpst that works if you use btrfs with subvolumes
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