Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals?
Dan Hollis (goemon@sasami.anime.net)
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 12:34:53 -0800 (PST)
On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> Dan Hollis writes:
> > On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, linux kernel account wrote:
> >> I think you should point out the classic horror story:
> >>
> >> Imagine the panic results in the coruption of the disk driver or
> >> the FS and it decides to dump core all over your important data..
> > Thats why BSD and others do a CRC on the dump code to make sure
> > everything is consistent enough to do a dump. It also only writes
> > to reserved section of the disk and not the filesystem. Thus the
> > horror story becomes vapor.
> Oddly however, NetBSD manages to trash partitions.
I did a search through altavista and was unable to find any reports. Do
you have any documented cases of this? Solaris dumps to swap when it goes
down, yet I havent heard any reports of Solaris trashing partitions due to
a crash dump.
> You'd need to CRC everything the dump code depends on:
> disk driver -> kmalloc -> slab system...
>
> Even when that looks good, the _hardware_ may be confused.
I'm leaning toward the way IRIX does dumps now... which nullifies all
arguments against 'confused hardware'. This will only be possible if a way
can be found to prevent BIOS from stomping all over memory on a warmboot
though.
-Dan