Re: oops file

Keith Owens (kaos@ocs.com.au)
Mon, 08 Nov 1999 20:31:45 +1100


On Mon, 8 Nov 1999 10:51:49 +0100,
"Thomas Pfeiffer" <pfeiffer@pds.de> wrote:
>I would like to debug the piece of code, so I came
>to ksymoops. The documentation always speaks about
>"the oops file" or similar.

It is just a file contains the text of the Oops message, any file.

Where is the_oops.txt?
----------------------

Normally the Oops text is read from the kernel buffers by klogd and
handed to syslogd which writes it to a syslog file, typically
/var/log/messages (depends on /etc/syslog.conf). Sometimes klogd dies,
in which case you can run dmesg > file to read the data from the kernel
buffers and save it. Or you can cat /proc/kmsg > file, however you
have to break in to stop the transfer, kmsg is a "never ending file".
If the machine has crashed so badly that you cannot enter commands then
you have three options :-

(1) Hand copy the text from the screen and type it in after the machine
has restarted. Messy but it is the only option if you have not
planned for a crash.

(2) Boot with a serial console (see Documentation/serial-console.txt),
run a null modem to a second machine and capture the output there
using your favourite communication program. Minicom works well.

(3) Patch the kernel with one of the crash dump patches. These save
data to a floppy disk or video rom or a swap partition. None of
these are standard kernel patches so you have to find and apply
them yourself. Search kernel archives for kmsgdump, lkcd and
oops+smram.

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