On 11 July 2013 05:40, Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik@redhat.com> wrote:

= Proposed System Wide Change: Enable kdump on secureboot machines =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Kdump_with_secureboot

Change owner(s): Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>

Currently kexec/kdump is disabled on machines with secureboot enabled. This
feature aims to enable kexec/kdump on such machines.

== Detailed description ==
/sbin/kexec prepares a binary blob, called purgatory. This code runs at
priviliged level between kernel transition. With secureboot enabled, no
unsigned code should run at privilige level 0, hence kexec/kdump is currently
disabled if secureboot is enabled.

My question is "Does kdump work even without secureboot?" In trying to debug a crashing bug with older kernels and F19 I enabled kdump to try and get a crashing image for the developers to work. I ran into a ton of issues and when asking on #fedora-kernel was given the strong impression that kdump was not expected to work by the various kernel developers.

Issues I ran into was:

1) kdump needs to write to an unencrypted disk space. I tried a USB disk and various other places but the best ability I got was reinstalling the laptop and making a /var/crash partition.

2) kdump didn't seem to dump for anything than the forced dump in the instruction manual.

In the end the kernel developers got me a kernel with enough oops detection to help find the problems but how do we get kdump to be more useful?

Stephen J Smoogen.