Introduction to Kdump

In the previous article, we discussed how to configure the system to automatically reboot after a Kernel Panic using the kernel.panic parameter. But what if we want to understand why the panic occurred? Simply restarting the system solves the availability problem but doesn’t help diagnose the cause. This is where kdump comes in.

kdump is an advanced mechanism in the Linux kernel that allows capturing the contents of system memory (a memory dump or crash dump) at the moment a Kernel Panic occurs. This dump can then be analyzed using specialized tools, such as crash, to identify a faulty driver, a bug in the kernel code, or another cause of the failure.