A kernel crash dump is a snapshot of system state taken at the time that the kernel crashed, useful for finding and debugging the problem that caused the crash in the first place. There is no standard mechanism for automatiaclly collecting a crash dump on Linux, but there are a number of existing projects working toward efficiently meeting this goal. A "Linux Kernel Dump Summit" was recently mentioned on the lkml, with participants from some of the many crash dump projects looking to standardize the dump process and information collected. A followup email noted, "as memory size grows, the time and space for capturing kernel crash dumps really matter." It went on to examine partial dumps, and full dumps that are compressed. The former risks not collecting information necessary for proper debugging, while the latter risks greatly increasing the amount of time required to collect a dump.

There are a number of existing projects for collecting automatic kernel crash dumps on Linux, including Linux Kernel Crash Dump (LKCD), Mini Kernel Dump (mkdump), kdump, and diskdump (detailed here). Some of these projects also include tools for examining the obtained dumpfiles. Other projects focus just on tools for analyzing kernel crash dumps, including the perl-based Alicia (the Advanced LInux Crash-dump Interactive Analyzer) and Red Hat's crash analysis tool "loosely based on the SVR4 UNIX crash command, but significantly enhanced by completely merging it with the GNU gdb debugger."