Kdump memory usage
summary
Kdump memory reservation drops from ~168 MB to roughly half by shrinking the initramfs (typical unpacked initramfs ~80 MB) and repackaging systemd to remove unused features, plus a new strict host-only mode that loads only drivers needed for the dump target. A compressed scratch image overlay keeps the initramfs compressed in RAM and mounts a small writable overlay. A tiny tracer called maintrack runs in-kdump (~4 MB) and records per-module and per-process peak allocations and stacks, which finds real bugs (one module used ~20k pages) and verifies the fixes.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00kdump memory usage intro
- 1:29Memory overhead in kdump
- 3:14Shrinking user space in Fedora
- 6:21Scratch filesystem for kdump
- 7:47Kernel memory tracking with memstrack
- 11:14Demo: memstrack analysis
- 13:00Real-world memstrack fixes
- 16:33Future memory optimizations
- 18:21Q&A on memstrack
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