With those changes, I was able to consistently dump vmcore images without any issues using several types of azure instances.
Besides that the utility crash also needs to be updated. Currently the xenial version of crash is not able to parse a linux-azure vmcore but the artful version is.
I'm running some tests with the artful crash utility and the linux-generic kernel to check if it's viable to bring that version to xenial.
I was able to properly dump a vmcore with the following steps:
1. kexec-tools patches with: vaddr_and_ size off-by-one fix
- ed15ba1b9977 build_mem_phdrs(): check if p_paddr is invalid
- 9f62cbddddfc kexec/arch/i386: Add support for KASLR memory randomization
- dbb99d938810 kexec-tools/x86: get_kernel_
2. crashkernel increased to 192M
3. linux-azure patched with:
- da63b6b20077 x86/KASLR: Fix kexec kernel boot crash when KASLR randomization fails
4. Forced storvsc instead of ata_piix.
With those changes, I was able to consistently dump vmcore images without any issues using several types of azure instances.
Besides that the utility crash also needs to be updated. Currently the xenial version of crash is not able to parse a linux-azure vmcore but the artful version is.
I'm running some tests with the artful crash utility and the linux-generic kernel to check if it's viable to bring that version to xenial.