Kdump, a kexec based kernel crash dumping mechanism, has witnessed a lot of new significant development activities recently. Features like, the relocatable kernel, dump filtering, and initrd based dumping have enhanced kdump capabilities are important steps towards making it a more reliable and easy to use solution. New tools like Linux Kernel Dump Test Module (LKDTM) provide an opportunity to automate kdump testing. It can be especially useful for distributions to detect and weed out regressions relatively quickly. This paper presents various newly introduced features and provides implementation details wherever appropriate. It also briefly discusses the future directions, such as early boot crash dumping.

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