you did not get an oops or a backtrace out of your logging serial consoles? I mean, I understand that a kernel dump does give you even more information, but a logging serial console does give you a lot of information, usually enough.
the kernel support for kdump is in the upstream kernel.org tree, I believe. you've gotta monkey with your initrd and the userland tools, though, last time I looked. It does seem pretty silly that linux seems to want to change the standard way to do crash dumps every two years. *BSD is much cleaner in this regard. But in my experience, a logging console is usually as useful (and sometimes more useful; logging consoles help in cases when the problem isn't a kernel panic, but is instead a weird network issue.) than kernel dumps. I remember last time I tried to debug an issue with kdump, the kernel would crash, then it would load the kdump kernel, but that, too would crash before dumping the kernel. (It turns out it was a hardware issue with the raid controller. Dumping to disk when disk is the problem doesn't work so well.)
But then, I'm a computer janitor, and not a kernel developer. I imagine there are reasons to get a full kernel dump when you are concerned with more than "Is this a kernel issue or is it bad hardware?"
the kernel support for kdump is in the upstream kernel.org tree, I believe. you've gotta monkey with your initrd and the userland tools, though, last time I looked. It does seem pretty silly that linux seems to want to change the standard way to do crash dumps every two years. *BSD is much cleaner in this regard. But in my experience, a logging console is usually as useful (and sometimes more useful; logging consoles help in cases when the problem isn't a kernel panic, but is instead a weird network issue.) than kernel dumps. I remember last time I tried to debug an issue with kdump, the kernel would crash, then it would load the kdump kernel, but that, too would crash before dumping the kernel. (It turns out it was a hardware issue with the raid controller. Dumping to disk when disk is the problem doesn't work so well.)
But then, I'm a computer janitor, and not a kernel developer. I imagine there are reasons to get a full kernel dump when you are concerned with more than "Is this a kernel issue or is it bad hardware?"