Re: Oops assist...

Harald Koenig (koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de)
Thu, 6 May 1999 09:18:12 +0200


On May 05, Dan Hollis wrote:

> On Wed, 5 May 1999, Olaf Titz wrote:
> > > Even more ideal would be to dump the oops to somewhere non volatile over
> > > a reboot. I'm not sure there are good candidates for this on a PC.
> > SunOS thinks the swap disk is a good one (for making crash dumps of
> > the whole system actually). If code in the boot scripts checks for a
> > crash-dump signature on the primary swap disk _before_ swapon'ing it,
> > this could be easily accessed (i.e. written elsewhere).
>
> SGI preserves ram on a reboot, unlike some PC BIOS which scribbles all
> over RAM on a reboot. So SGI can do a 100% safe crashdump by dumping after
> the system has been reset. Anyone know a PC BIOS which doesnt mangle RAM?

at least on cold power-on you first have to write something to RAM
to initialize the parity bit(s). if you try to read RAM first,
odds are 50% that the parity bit is wrong and you'll get an NMI...

Harald

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