Re: The stability crisis

brian@worldcontrol.com
Fri, 2 Jul 1999 02:54:25 -0700


On Tue, Jun 29, 1999 at 03:46:52PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> So why didn't you even include a ksymoops version of the crash? Or a good
> hardware description? People do try to follow it, but it's not as if I've
> seen very good reports even from people who say it's obviously bad. And
> others are completely unable to reproduce the problem, so..
>
> Right now the problem is (a) lack of good data and (b) the fact that there
> were very few changes between 2.2.7 (which many claim is stable) and 2.2.9
> (which many claim is broken). The major changes were actually just reverts
> of 2.2.8 (which _was_ badly broken due to fs) - the majority by far is
> actually ARM, Sparc, PPC and alpha merges..
>
> SMP?
>
> MTRR enabled?
>
> gcc version?
>
> Quotas?
>
> Linus

I'm not the person Linus was addressing, but I've had plenty of
oopses with 2.2.1 - 2.2.10 and have not sent any in.

So far as I know there are only two ways to capture the data related to
an oops. Write it down with a pencil, or capture it via a serial port
on another machine. The first seems too prone to errors, and the second
just isn't realistic for me and my cluster of machines. Too many
serial cables going every which way. Or maybe I'm just lazy.

I have a setup which oopses in 5 minutes to a few days when compiled
with SMP support. The identical source compiled without SMP runs
forever as far as I can tell.

Since all things have previously be discussed on this list, I'm going
to let my linux "newbieism" show by asking for a feature which has
undoubtably been asked for before and has undoubtable been shot
down for very legitimate reasons.

I would like my oops'ing systems to send the oops to another system via
an ethernet interface. How about a UDP packet? Nice connectionless
protocol. Compile the MAC/IP address into the kernel. Opps occurs,
build the UDP packet with the measly 2K oops message in it and send.

-- 
Brian Litzinger <brian@litzinger.com>

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