Speaker
Omar Sandoval
Description
Kernel core dumps are usually saved to disk by the kdump capture kernel, then inspected once the system reboots into the normal kernel. However, saving a core dump to disk may not be desirable for many reasons: security/compliance requirements, inadequate disk space, excessive downtime, etc. One potential alternative is to use drgn directly in the kdump capture kernel to run a script that extracts and saves a predefined set of important information rather than a core dump. This has its own challenges, mainly because the kdump environment has very limited memory. Let's discuss making drgn work better in low-memory environments, as well as alternative solutions and the general problem of kdump memory constraints.
