> 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
-- All SCSI disks will from now on ___ _____ be required to send an email notice 0--,| /OOOOOOO\ 24 hours prior to complete hardware failure! <_/ / /OOOOOOOOOOO\ \ \/OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO\ \ OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO|// Harald Koenig, \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Inst.f.Theoret.Astrophysik // / \\ \ koenig@tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de ^^^^^ ^^^^^- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/