Re: The stability crisis

Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Tue, 29 Jun 1999 23:04:10 +0000 ( )


I really wish I could report my oopses, but this is a production box and I
can't just let it sit there while I write down an oops. The syslog
doesn't catch the OOPS except for sometimes the first few lines. Uptime is
very important to me, as you have probably noticed from my rant. I don't
want to use a serial console becuase I don't have another machine in the
vicinity of 20 feet that would be capable of easilly logging kernel
messages.

I've heard about a new patch that lets the kernel dump oopsen to a floppy,
and I'll try it. It scares me that I might accidentally leave a floppy in
the drive that actually has data.

As I said in a previous message to linux-kernel, I'd be happy to maintain
a bug database if that would be within my realm of comprehension (I don't
know very much about the kernel internals...).

The machine is a Cyrix 6x86MX (no SMP) running RedHat 5.1 with most of the
packages at either 5.2 or 6.0 versions. MTRR is enabled in the kernel but
I haven't used it for anything yet so I would assume that it is not
causing problems. I don't run X. No quotas.

[aaronl@vitelus aaronl]$ gcc --version
egcs-2.91.66

On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:

>
>
> So why didn't you even include a ksymoops version of the crash? Or a good
> hardware description? People do try to follow it, but it's not as if I've
> seen very good reports even from people who say it's obviously bad. And
> others are completely unable to reproduce the problem, so..
>
> Right now the problem is (a) lack of good data and (b) the fact that there
> were very few changes between 2.2.7 (which many claim is stable) and 2.2.9
> (which many claim is broken). The major changes were actually just reverts
> of 2.2.8 (which _was_ badly broken due to fs) - the majority by far is
> actually ARM, Sparc, PPC and alpha merges..
>
> SMP?
>
> MTRR enabled?
>
> gcc version?
>
> Quotas?
>
> Linus
>

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