In theory, when a system is "oopsing", it is unsafe to do anything.
In practise, I agree with you that writing to a harddisk is more
dangerous than writing to a floppy.
On the other hand, having a system control (ioctl on a file?, sysctl?,
/proc?) that tells the system: "Please use that for crash dumps", and
requires the file to be appropriately sized and preallocated would, in
my opinion, be safe enough. Once the system thinks: "this is going the
wrong way", it should write out the messages buffer to the
pre-determined blocks.
If those pre-determined block numbers are wrong (random pointer), then
it is most likely that lots of other stuff was broken first, so that
writing to disk is no longer possible.
Roger.
-- ** R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2137555 ** *-- BitWizard writes Linux device drivers for any device you may have! --* ------ Microsoft SELLS you Windows, Linux GIVES you the whole house ------
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