How should I capture Linux kernel panic stack traces?

Posted by Alnitak on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Alnitak
Published on 2010-09-15T19:25:51Z Indexed on 2010/12/29 15:55 UTC
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linux

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trace

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kernel-panic

What's current best practice to capture full kernel stack traces on a Linux system (RHEL 5.x, kernel 2.6.18) that occasionally panics in a device driver?

I'm used to the "old" SunOS way of doing things - crash dumps get written to swap, and on reboot the dump gets retrieved in the local file system. man 8 crash refers to diskdump, but that appears to be unsupported. and/or deprecated.

I've played with kdump, but it's unclear whether I can get a stack trace from that. Triggering a panic via Magic SysRq didn't create one. It also seems wasteful to reserve so much memory (128MB) just for a kexec crash recovery kernel.

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