F20 System Wide Change: Enable kdump on secureboot machines

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 11 July 2013 05:40, Jaroslav Reznik <jreznik at 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 at 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.
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