Why is kernel-kdump missing on SLES11

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

Situation

To configure the system for capturing kernel dumps, on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 the packages kernel-kdump and kexec-tools needed to be installed (see TID 000016171 Configure crashkernel memory for kernel core dump analysis )

On SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 there is no special kernel-kdump required like in earlier versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The technical reason is that the normal kernel is relocatable now and can be used as kdump kernel, i.e. it's possible to load and execute the normal kernel at any address, not only the compiled-in address as before.

Resolution

On SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 only the following software packages are required for kdump:

- kexec-tools
- kdump
- makedumpfile

A simple method to configure kdump on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is to use the YaST kdump module. Then in addition to the above packages, the following package is needed:

- yast2-kdump

Disclaimer

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