"Venkatesan, Ganesh" [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Do you know enough about kexec to attempt to reproduce this problem
that way?

Not much. All I have is an old paper by Andy Pfiffer. Could you point me
to more resources on this?

Short explanation:

The user space lives at:
http://www.xmission.com/~ebiederm/files/kexec/kexec-tools-1.101.tar.gz
Other bits and pieces can be found at:
http://www.xmission.com/~ebiederm/files/kexec/

The latest patches are in the -mm tree.

Usually it is as simple as:
/sbin/kexec -l /path/to/bzImage --append='your command line options'
Then drop to single user mode and do:
/sbin/kexec -e

My patches have not made into the initscripts yet so doing a clean system
shutdown has not been fully automated yet.  

i386 and x86-64 architectures should both work.

Not it is a matter of slowing digging into the hardware support code and
getting out the bugs that are revealed.

Eric