Re: Crash dumps (was: Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals?)

Dan Hollis (goemon@sasami.anime.net)
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 11:44:44 -0800 (PST)


On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Werner Almesberger wrote:
> > using the old 0x1234 warm reboot trick should avoid wiping the memory.
> I've tried now with reboot=w,b and executing the reboot command,
> and the (AMI) BIOS seems to ignore this completely and still happily
> clears all my memory. Did anybody get the BIOS to _not_ interfere ?

Is this related to the memory test? E.g. does turning off the memory test
fix things?

> > IMHO oops reports tend to be enough to get one looking in the
> > right direction.
> I think the main use for crash dumps is for remote support. Asking for
> a single big file is likely to be easier than asking for a few dozen
> items from /proc and such, which may also have changed since. Also, a
> crash dump will contain the last few precious kernel messages.

Also a crash dump would allow developers to browse memory structures to
see what exactly caused the crash (e.g. a pointer in a structure got
mangled, but is the structure itself valid? what about the pointer to that
struct? etc. etc.)

-DAn