Re: Oops to floppy patch enhancement

Willy Tarreau (willy@novworld.Novecom.Fr)
Mon, 5 Jul 1999 08:30:39 +0200 (CEST)


Hi Neil !

>
> I like your patch but I have an idea of how to improve it. It
> seems to me that many times after an oops the keyboard is locked
> up.

It's often the case, but I try to reset it, and use the bios to read
from it, because there are more chances here than from a solid hung kernel.

> Auto dump mode is scary because you could accidently
> overwrite some floppy with important data on it. Could you check
> for some magic bytes at the start of the floppy before doing an
> automatic dump? These bytes would placed on an "oops floppy".
> They would hopefully not be present on any floppy with good data
> on it. You could make an "oops floppy" something like this:
>
> echo "oops floppy" | dd if=- of=/dev/fd0
>
> I hope I have explained this okay. Let me know what you think.

I think this a quite a good idea which could be applied particularly to
RAW dump (because some people who want FAT prefer not to bother how to
"cook" the diskette). But this could be included as a compile-time option,
IMO.

I'm currently working on the 0.3 release and it now gives an interactive menu
on a blue screen ... I'll think about including this feature in the same
release.

> Later.
>
>
> Neil
>
Willy

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