RE: Oops assist...

BROWN Nick (Nick.BROWN@coe.int)
Fri, 7 May 1999 09:40:00 +0200


>[AV]In other words, goodbye non-standard bootloaders (e.g. LOADLIN).

>[SD]I'd suggest a submenu in the kernel config, allowing options like (off
the
>[SD]top of my head):
>[SD] i) write oops data to console / serial / parallel
>[SD] ii) broadcast oops data to network (UDP? raw ethernet frames?)
>[SD] iii) write to (reserved?) hard disk area via BIOS
>[SD] iv) write to IDE hard disk area
>[SD] v) save to nvram
>[SD] vi) store in RAM area conserved across reboot
>[SD] vii) store in VGA card framebuffer conserved across reboot

The tradeoff here appears to be:
- it's hard to do stuff reliably after an Oops has occurred, for obvious
reasons
- it's non-portable to define what should happen at reboot time

(i) should be to the serial port, I think. The console is about to be wiped
clean by the BIOS at reboot time, and there could be anything on the
parallel port.

(ii) should ideally be something which an SNMP-based network monitor could
make sense of.

I think (iii) could be feasible if there were a specialised dump partition
(the preferred dump location for VMS is a preassigned dump file, for
example), which could perhaps be part of the swap partition, but needn't be
- a lot of people don't have huge swap partitions anyway. Most people
aren't interested in dumps, but for sites with big servers, a dedicated
partition for dumps would be part of prudent OS installation planning.

---------------------------------------------------------------
|\ | o _ |/ Life's like a jigsaw
| \| | |_ |\ You get the straight bits
But there's something missing in the middle

Nick Brown, Strasbourg, France (Nick(dot)Brown(at)coe(dot)int)
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