> Is there really no better way to do this than to have an entire second kernel
> ready to take over? Like a more specialized piece of code that only handles
> kernel coredumps?
So the requirements of this software are: It must be able to boot a system, write to the specific sections of memory, have some method of initializing hardware, some ability to write the other memory to disk or network connections. It sounds like you're talking about an OS.
A crash dumper does not have to be implemented with a reboot; this is just something Linux chooses to do. I have actually worked on kernel code that performs crash dumps to disk and over the network, if you find that kind of expertise relevant.
So the requirements of this software are: It must be able to boot a system, write to the specific sections of memory, have some method of initializing hardware, some ability to write the other memory to disk or network connections. It sounds like you're talking about an OS.
I believe this is exactly what KDUMP does.