Bug 153957 - diskdump partition got re-initilized during machine boot up if /var/crash does not have enough space to store vmcore
Summary: diskdump partition got re-initilized during machine boot up if /var/crash doe...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3
Classification: Red Hat
Component: diskdumputils
Version: 3.0
Hardware: i686
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Akira Imamura
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2005-04-06 02:01 UTC by Shu-Chih Lin
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:07 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-04-07 00:10:59 UTC
Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:


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Description Shu-Chih Lin 2005-04-06 02:01:38 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

Description of problem:
diskdump partition got re-initilized during machine boot up if /var/crash does not have enough space to store vmcore. As a result, the most recent kernel coredump stored in the diskdump partition is lost.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
diskdumputils-0.4.0-1

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Symbolic link /var/crash to a file system with less than 100MB free space
   left
2. Cause the kernel to panic (e.g. insmod ./crash.o as illustrated in
   /usr/share/doc/diskdump*/README.*)
3. After the incore image has been dumped to pre-defined diskdump partition, 
   restart the machine.   

Actual Results:  During bootup, error message would indicate not enough
space has been detected in /var/crash and yet the diskdump partition still got re-initialized right afterwards

Expected Results:  If /var/crash does not have enough space, it should report error and skip the re-initialization step. This way, system administrator can clean up /var/crash and use "savecore" to save vmcore into /var/crash afterwards. Or else, the core from the most recent kernel panic is lost forever.


Additional info:

Comment 1 Akira Imamura 2005-04-06 19:03:22 UTC
This is not a bug. This is a deliberate action that device is reformatted even 
if savecore fails. This means that diskdump is always available because 
diskdump formats a device when diskdump starts. Please use a script file 
called diskdump-nospace in order to avoid the problem mentioned above.
A description of diskdump-nospace is here:
 /usr/share/doc/diskdumputils-0.4.0/README
The script file itself is here:
 /usr/share/doc/diskdumputils-0.4.0/example_scripts/diskdump-nospace
The usage is shown in the above script file. diskdump-nospace can clean 
up "/var/crash" by customizing.

Thanks,
Akira


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