Re: [Bug #11035] System hangs on 2.6.26-rc8

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Fri Jul 18 2008 - 18:25:52 EST



* Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> BTW, I didn't consider that argument (of continuing as far as
> possible) before, but it's a good one; if we don't crash completely,
> the user can still copy the log we have a better report of it. I guess
> kerneloops.org is currently missing out a great deal of reports which
> all shut down the machine immediately without a chance to go into the
> log.

yes. There are two techniques to improve the 'yield' of kerneloops.org:
1) make a better job of getting the logs off the box 2) make a better
job of not crashing the box when we can do better.

For example lockdep tries very hard to never crash the box. It is a
feature that warns about a chance of a lockup, not about a lockup itself
- so crashing the box at the point of the bug detection is
counter-productive.

The same applies to DEBUG_PAGEALLOC as well: technically nobody (but the
buggy code itself) is hurt by accessing already freed data. So we could
try and let it run.

(Btw., this might be a way to share a mechanism between kmemcheck and
DEBUG_PAGEALLOC, and make kmemcheck more useful to the general kernel as
a whole.)

Ingo
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