How to best debug kernel problems

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does turning on kdump and installing debuginfo kernel stuff change
> things in a way that a watchdog oops won't happen?

I doubt the debuginfo package install has anything to do with it, as
that is really only used by things like crash (and maybe perf?).
Enabling kdump does cause some changes though, as the kernel will
reserve a section of memory to put the kdump kernel in.  It's
plausible that your machine is tripping on some memory issues and
enabling kdump is forcing the kernel to not touch that memory at
runtime.  It's something of a long shot but it's plausible.

If you haven't already, try running memtest86+ for a while and see if
it comes back with any errors.

josh