1 s390 SCSI dump tool (zfcpdump)
3 System z machines (z900 or higher) provide hardware support for creating system
4 dumps on SCSI disks. The dump process is initiated by booting a dump tool, which
5 has to create a dump of the current (probably crashed) Linux image. In order to
6 not overwrite memory of the crashed Linux with data of the dump tool, the
7 hardware saves some memory plus the register sets of the boot cpu before the
8 dump tool is loaded. There exists an SCLP hardware interface to obtain the saved
9 memory afterwards. Currently 32 MB are saved.
11 This zfcpdump implementation consists of a Linux dump kernel together with
12 a userspace dump tool, which are loaded together into the saved memory region
13 below 32 MB. zfcpdump is installed on a SCSI disk using zipl (as contained in
14 the s390-tools package) to make the device bootable. The operator of a Linux
15 system can then trigger a SCSI dump by booting the SCSI disk, where zfcpdump
18 The kernel part of zfcpdump is implemented as a debugfs file under "zcore/mem",
19 which exports memory and registers of the crashed Linux in an s390
20 standalone dump format. It can be used in the same way as e.g. /dev/mem. The
21 dump format defines a 4K header followed by plain uncompressed memory. The
22 register sets are stored in the prefix pages of the respective cpus. To build a
23 dump enabled kernel with the zcore driver, the kernel config option
24 CONFIG_ZFCPDUMP has to be set. When reading from "zcore/mem", the part of
25 memory, which has been saved by hardware is read by the driver via the SCLP
26 hardware interface. The second part is just copied from the non overwritten real
29 The userspace application of zfcpdump can reside e.g. in an intitramfs or an
30 initrd. It reads from zcore/mem and writes the system dump to a file on a
33 To build a zfcpdump kernel use the following settings in your kernel
38 * Enable ext2 and ext3 filesystems
39 * Disable as many features as possible to keep the kernel small.
40 E.g. network support is not needed at all.
42 To use the zfcpdump userspace application in an initramfs you have to do the
45 * Copy the zfcpdump executable somewhere into your Linux tree.
46 E.g. to "arch/s390/boot/zfcpdump. If you do not want to include
47 shared libraries, compile the tool with the "-static" gcc option.
48 * If you want to include e2fsck, add it to your source tree, too. The zfcpdump
49 application attempts to start /sbin/e2fsck from the ramdisk.
50 * Use an initramfs config file like the following:
53 nod /dev/console 644 0 0 c 5 1
54 nod /dev/null 644 0 0 c 1 3
55 nod /dev/sda1 644 0 0 b 8 1
56 nod /dev/sda2 644 0 0 b 8 2
57 nod /dev/sda3 644 0 0 b 8 3
58 nod /dev/sda4 644 0 0 b 8 4
59 nod /dev/sda5 644 0 0 b 8 5
60 nod /dev/sda6 644 0 0 b 8 6
61 nod /dev/sda7 644 0 0 b 8 7
62 nod /dev/sda8 644 0 0 b 8 8
63 nod /dev/sda9 644 0 0 b 8 9
64 nod /dev/sda10 644 0 0 b 8 10
65 nod /dev/sda11 644 0 0 b 8 11
66 nod /dev/sda12 644 0 0 b 8 12
67 nod /dev/sda13 644 0 0 b 8 13
68 nod /dev/sda14 644 0 0 b 8 14
69 nod /dev/sda15 644 0 0 b 8 15
70 file /init arch/s390/boot/zfcpdump 755 0 0
71 file /sbin/e2fsck arch/s390/boot/e2fsck 755 0 0
77 * Issue "make image" to build the zfcpdump image with initramfs.
79 In a Linux distribution the zfcpdump enabled kernel image must be copied to
80 /usr/share/zfcpdump/zfcpdump.image, where the s390 zipl tool is looking for the
81 dump kernel when preparing a SCSI dump disk.
83 If you use a ramdisk copy it to "/usr/share/zfcpdump/zfcpdump.rd".
85 For more information on how to use zfcpdump refer to the s390 'Using the Dump
86 Tools book', which is available from
87 http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390.
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