Bernhard Kaindl wrote:
> An analogy to doctors, hospitals and patients:
I have a simpler medical analogy:
- in many cases, all you know is that the patient died
(e.g. think of a router - it has no console, no user
interacting with it, etc.)
- the Oops tells you the the patient died of a heart failure
(NULL pointer dereferenced in this or that function, called
from ...)
- but it's only the autopsy (the crash dump) that reveals that
the patient was poisoned, and that this is not a routine
case
I view crash dumps as a tool that helps me imagine what the
machine was doing. Without that, I can learn many interesting
things about the code, but I won't necessarily find the actual
bug.
Examples of non-obvious bugs can be found in the various module
unload race discussions. There, usually competent people
suggested incorrect designs, simply because they failed to
imagine some constellations, and no amount of staring at the
source could have helped this lack of imagination.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina wa@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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