Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> said:
[...]
> I dealt with crash dumps quite a lot over 10 years with SCO UNIX,
> OpenServer and UnixWare: which were addressing the PC market, not
> own hardware.
What I remember about hardware compatibility for SCO Unix and Solaris on
ia32 is _not_ funny. Lightyears from what Linux handles today without
breaking a sweat.
> It's a real worry that writing a crash dump to disk might stomp in the
> wrong place, but I don't recall it ever happening in practice. But
> occasionally, yes, a dump was not generated at all, or not completed.
How do you test that? Not in some contrieved situation, under real crashes.
Don't just consider crashes in the official $DISTRIBUTION kernel, but in
Linus' BK tree, or some of the random, two-or-three-letter-trees of the day
(_that_ is where crashes happen, _that_ is where the info would be most
valuable). It gets _real_ hairy _real_ fast to make sure you don't scribble
over /home or /etc on the user's disk...
> Of course, you could argue that SCO's disk drivers were more stable :-)
If you only handle a few, thoroughly tested, high-end controllers and
disks, that is not too hard to do.
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 - 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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 07 2002 - 22:00:33 EST