Supported Kdump Targets This document try to list all supported kdump targets, and those supported or unknown/tech-preview targets, this can help users to decide whether a dump solution is available. Dump Target support status ========================== This section tries to come up with some kind of guidelines in terms of what dump targets are supported/not supported. Whatever is listed here is not binding in any manner. It is just sharing of current understanding and if something is not right, this section needs to be edited. Following are 3 lists. First one contains supported targets. These are generic configurations which should work and some configuration most likely has worked in testing. Second list is known unsupported targets. These targets we know either don't work or we don't support. And third list is unknown/tech-preview. We either don't yet know the status of kdump on these targets or these are under tech-preview. Note, these lists are not set in stone and can be changed at any point of time. Also these lists might not be complete. We will add/remove items to it as we get more testing information. Also, there are many corner cases which can't possibly be listed. For example in general we might be supporting software iscsi but there might be some configurations of it which don't work. So if any target is listed in supported section, it does not mean it works in all possible configurations. It just means that in common configurations it should work but there can be issues with particular configurations which are not supported. As we come to know of particular issues, we will keep on updating lists accordingly. Supported Dump targets ---------------------- storage: LVM volume Thin provisioning volume FC disks (qla2xxx, lpfc, bnx2fc, bfa) software initiator based iSCSI software RAID (mdraid) hardware RAID (cciss, hpsa, megaraid_sas, mpt2sas, aacraid) SCSI/SATA disks iSCSI HBA (all offload) hardware FCoE (qla2xxx, lpfc) software FCoE (bnx2fc) (Extra configuration required, please read "Note on FCoE" section below) network: Hardware using kernel modules: (tg3, igb, ixgbe, sfc, e1000e, bna, cnic, netxen_nic, qlge, bnx2x, bnx, qlcnic, be2net, enic, virtio-net, ixgbevf, igbvf) protocol: ipv4 bonding vlan bridge team vlan tagged bonding bridge over bond/team/vlan hypervisor: kvm xen (Supported in select configurations only) filesystem: ext[234] xfs nfs firmware: BIOS UEFI hypervisor: VMWare ESXi 4.1 and 5.1 Hyper-V 2012 R2 (RHEL Gen1 UP Guest only) Unsupported Dump targets ------------------------ storage: BIOS RAID Software iSCSI with iBFT (bnx2i, cxgb3i, cxgb4i) Software iSCSI with hybrid (be2iscsi) FCoE legacy IDE glusterfs gfs2/clvm/halvm network: hardware using kernel modules: (sfc SRIOV, cxgb4vf, pch_gbe) protocol: ipv6 wireless Infiniband (IB) vlan over bridge/team filesystem: btrfs Unknown/tech-preview -------------------- storage: PCI Express based SSDs hypervisor: Hyper-V 2008 Hyper-V 2012 Note on FCoE ===================== If you are trying to dump to a software FCoE target, you may encounter OOM issue, because some software FCoE requires more memory to work. In such case, you may need to increase the kdump reserved memory size in "crashkernel=" kernel parameter. By default, RHEL systems have "crashkernel=auto" in kernel boot arguments. The auto reserved memory size is designed to balance the coverage of use cases and an acceptable memory overhead, so not every use case could fit in, software FCoE is one of the case. For hardware FCoE, kdump should work naturally as firmware will do the initialization job. The capture kernel and kdump tools will run just fine. Useful Links ============ [1] RHEL6: Enabling kdump for full-virt (HVM) Xen DomU (https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/92943)