Question: Can anybody help me troubleshoot kdump?

I have an up to date Fedora 36 system deployed on baremetal (NUC8i5BEH with 32GB memory) that is spontaneously rebooting, and I am trying to configure kdump so that I can see if it is a kernel issue or hardware issue, but can’t get the service to start.

I have followed the documentation here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_kdump_to_debug_kernel_crashes

However I am unable to start the kdump service, getting the following errors:

[root@nuc ~]# systemctl status kdump
× kdump.service - Crash recovery kernel arming
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/kdump.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2022-06-03 10:06:10 AEST; 12min ago
Process: 51832 ExecStart=/usr/bin/kdumpctl start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
Main PID: 51832 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
CPU: 616ms

Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan systemd[1]: Starting kdump.service - Crash recovery kernel arming...
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan kdumpctl[52000]: ERROR: src/skipcpio/skipcpio.c:191:main(): fwrite
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan kdumpctl[52092]: ERROR: src/skipcpio/skipcpio.c:191:main(): fwrite
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan kdumpctl[51834]: kdump: Secure Boot is enabled. Using kexec file based syscall.
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan kdumpctl[51834]: kdump: kexec: failed to load kdump kernel
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan kdumpctl[51834]: kdump: Starting kdump: [FAILED]
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan systemd[1]: kdump.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan systemd[1]: kdump.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jun 03 10:06:10 nuc.lan systemd[1]: Failed to start kdump.service - Crash recovery kernel arming.

Google searches for the error message lead me to a SUSE forum that has seen the same error but with different results, so I am a bit stuck for ideas at the moment. Has anybody got any suggestions on how I can dig deeper into this?

Note: I have also posted this question on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/v3n4i9/question_can_anybody_help_me_troubleshoot_kdump/

1 Like

I also want to add that I have tested this on a Fedora 36 server VM built from a cloud qcow and kdump had no issues starting.

Same problem. Did you ever find out?

I was able to solve the solve the issue by disabling Secure Boot.
See my thread: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/issues-in-enabling-kdump/