Re: [PATCH] vmcore: report the release of the crashed kernel

[sashiko-bot]

> kdump runs in a very small environment and cut-down set of drivers, and
> it can die before the dump lands: it runs out of memory, a device hangs
> on reset, or a watchdog fires while the dump is still being written out.
> This happens about a single high digit percentage on most of big scale
> datacenters.
> 
> When that happens the only evidence left is what the capture kernel
> printed to the console, and that does not say which kernel crashed.
> 
> A fleet typically pins one kdump image and boots it after crashes from
> many different production kernels, and it is useful to understand what
> are the combination of crashed kernel panic and succesful kdump
> collection.
> 
> Whether the dump completes at all tends to depend on the kernel that
> died: memory pinned, devices in flight, dump size.
> 
> The release is already recorded.  crash_save_vmcoreinfo_init() puts
> OSRELEASE= in the VMCOREINFO note, and by the time vmcore_init() has run
> parse_crash_elf_headers() that note sits in elfnotes_buf.  Walk the notes
> for it and print:
> 
>   vmcore: dump is from kernel 7.3.0-rc3-next-20260917
> 
> Given this is cheap and useful, I think it is worth adding to vmcore, to
> improve kdump monitoring.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Breno Leitao <leitao@xxxxxxxxxx>

Sashiko has reviewed this patch and found no issues. It looks great!

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Sashiko AI review · https://sashiko.dev/#/patchset/20260921-kdump_print-v1-1-e445fec3177c@xxxxxxxxxx?part=1