Comment 14 for bug 710733

I'm trying to get crash dumps working, and there's a number of showstoppers going on (in current Natty).

First, the default crashkernel=... memory allocation for systems with up to 2GB RAM isn't even enough for the Ubuntu kernel: bug #785394

Second, the linux-crashdump package depends on "makedumpfile" instead of "makedumpfile-static". The former dynamically links against a whole bunch of stuff, and fails horribly in the initramfs environment ("error while loading shared libraries: libdw.so.1"). I'm guessing the reason for this is that makedumpfile-static only came into being in Natty.

Third, the makedumpfile-static package has an initramfs hook (/usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/makedumpfile) that copies the static makedumpfile binary into the initrd, but this is useless, because kexec-tools' /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-bottom/0_kdump unconditionally uses the dynamic /usr/bin/makedumpfile on the mounted root partition! Bug #785425

When I address these issues, I am able to get a proper crash dump:

# ls -l /var/crash/
total 91660
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 93760303 2011-05-19 17:47 linux-image-2.6.38-8-generic.0.crash