Re: The stability crisis

Chuck Lever (cel@monkey.org)
Thu, 1 Jul 1999 22:42:08 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> According to Chuck Lever:
> > having a nice integrated kernel debugger like SGI's kdb would be great
> > to resolve problems like these. the patch to dump an oops to a floppy is
> > also good, but would it be possible to dump it to a file or a small
> > partition on an internal disk instead?
>
> You'd have to be careful to protect the disk geometry info. Memory
> corruption could change the "dump at this block" variable... :-(

i don't think that's much of a risk, actually. i've used features like
this on mainframes and under Solaris for years, and never had a problem
like this. it's easy to reboot a small program that does this, or have
logic that rereads the VTOC before dumping. even so, you'd have to have a
pretty pathological kernel to experience something like this, IMO.

- Chuck Lever

--
corporate:	<chuckl@netscape.com>
personal:	<chucklever@netscape.net> or <cel@monkey.org>


The Linux Scalability project:
	http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/linux-scalability/




-
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/