Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals?
Dan Hollis (goemon@sasami.anime.net)
Mon, 19 Jan 1998 14:29:17 -0800 (PST)
On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, John Alvord wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
> > > > Thats all I can think of right now.. I'm sure there are many more things
> > > > that I would feel nessassary in a 3.0 release.. I'm sure others can add..
> > > How about a kernel panic core memory dump to disk for forensic research?
> > The current logic behind not doing this in linux is that since its
> > impossible to do it perfectly (e.g. 100% foolproof under all situations),
> > it shouldnt be done at all. (Still, BSD manages to do it).
> A couple weeks ago, Linus stated quite clearly that he disliked crash
> dumps because they led to a style of fault repair which often fixed the
> symptom instead of fixing the problem. By giving less information, a
> programmer was forced to understand the problem, instead of patching it
> away.
Quite often (50% - 60%) of the time, there is not enough information from
an OOPS to know what happened. Ive got a huge pile of oops reports where
all anyone could do is shrug their shoulders and say 'well, if it happens
again let me know. i dont have the slightest clue because theres not
enough information from an OOPS to tell.'
A crashdump in those situations would have been extremely valuable.
-Dan