RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

kdumpctl requires the presence of /etc/fstab or else the service fails to start.
Our diskless clients do not have /etc/fstab and they work perfectly well. To make kdump start we have to make an empty /etc/fstab and set its date to something sufficiently old that making a new initramrd doesn't get built. This is inconvenient. We think that if /etc/fstab were actually truly needed then having an empty file would not be sufficient. The fact that it works so long as the file exists even if it is empty suggests that it isn't really needed. Therefore, we think that the kexec tools should not error out if there is no /etc/fstab.

An /etc/fstab wasn't needed in rhel6

Posted patch to the upstream(kexec.org) for review. It will be back ported to rhel7 after upstream review and merging.

Upstream patch under review:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/kexec@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/RQPYFAURA3SDYAML46DVQLH2G54GHWTN/

Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.

For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.

If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.

https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2017:2300