Re: [RFC] autokdump - automated kdump testsuite

From: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
To: CAI Qian <caiqian@redhat.com>
Cc: ltp-list <ltp-list@lists.sourceforge.net>,
	kexec <kexec@lists.infradead.org>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	crash-utility <crash-utility@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] autokdump - automated kdump testsuite
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 08:09:59 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140923120959.GB1732@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1446076274.27552759.1411440835273.JavaMail.zimbra@redhat.com>

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 10:53:55PM -0400, CAI Qian wrote:

[..]
> > Why not simply let the respective service on the host do this job and
> > test only makes sure that kdump service is running. It feels little
> > out of place that a test is generating custom initramfs.
> Because not every distro will have a kdump service like Fedora.

So which distro does not have a service? Do we know this or we are
assuming that distributions don't have a service to load/unload
kdump kernel.

[..]
> > makedumpfile will reduce the vmcore file size to few hundreds of mega
> > bytes on most of the systems. Especially, this is just a test, so
> > system will be lightly loaded and vmcore will be small after filtering.
> It probably actually have test cases to heavily loaded the memory before
> dumping.

Your original proposal does not take care of this case either. A test
case could be heavily used memory and if user does not have sufficient
memory to save core, so be it. That test will fail.

Thanks
Vivek