Re: Direct writing to the IDE on panic?

[Alan Cox]

On Iau, 2006-04-13 at 09:55 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has done some work to directly write and poll
> to the IDE?  This is to store data on a panic or oops.  So it would need
> to bypass pretty much all the normal Linux mechanisms to do low lever
> IDE work.

I've seen some 2.4 work here. For 2.6 the current focus is kexec of
course

> Obviously, this would be a slow process, but the system has crashed and
> we care more about retrieving information than speed.
> 
> Has this already been done and what issues need to be addressed?

The big issue is 'how am I sure the partition data and code I run are
valid post crash'. You don't want the risk of dumping to the wrong part
of the disk and making a crash into a disaster.


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/