Re: The stability crisis

Dominik Kubla (dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de)
Mon, 5 Jul 1999 10:23:27 +0200


On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 09:21:57AM +0200, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> >>>>> "Ralf" == Ralf Baechle <ralf@uni-koblenz.de> writes:
> Ralf> One of the things I liked when starting my work on Linux/O200 is
> Ralf> that IRIX (to be obsoleted ;-) produces these nice kernel core
> Ralf> dumps, crashlogs and automated analysis of the cause of the
> Ralf> crash. Something like that will help both admins and kernel
> Ralf> developers.
>
> YUCK
>
> Well IRIX boxes tend to have a PROM in which there is a file system
> and a disk driver, thus when the system goes totally boink they can
> escape to those and still do the core dump. That is pretty hard on
> todays PC hardware.

Well, then we just do it on systems that do have support in their firmware.
For starters that would be: alpha, sparc, sparc64, mips and hppa, possibly
arm and m68k as well. The only architecture which really has problems with
this is the PC (not PS/2: they have a protected mode BIOS as far as i
know), but that should be solveable with some ingenuity and real-mode
callbacks... And i wouldn't mind adding an old 300-500 MB IDE disk to my
servers solely for the purpose of capturing crash dumps if that were
necessary.

> Other than that I still haven't found much more useful info in those
> monster dumps you get on commercial system than what the OOPS provides.

Well, but other people have. So IMHO we should add the possibility of
generating kernel dumps where possible. Just make it an option, so people
feeling uncomfortable about it could disable it...

Yours,
Dominik Kubla

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