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6.1. Introduction
A Kernel Crash Dump refers to a portion of the contents of volatile memory (RAM) that is copied to disk whenever the execution of the kernel is disrupted. The following events can cause a kernel disruption :
• Kernel Panic
• Non Maskable Interrupts (NMI)
• Machine Check Exceptions (MCE)
• Hardware failure
• Manual intervention
For some of those events (panic, NMI) the kernel will react automatically and trigger the crash dump mechanism through kexec. In other situations a manual intervention is required in order to capture the memory. Whenever one of the above events occurs, it is important to find out the root cause in order to prevent it from happening again. The cause can be determined by inspecting the copied memory contents.