Sudden death syndrome ...

Werner Almesberger (almesber@lrc.epfl.ch)
Wed, 18 Oct 1995 11:43:45 +0100 (MET)

By the way, given that so many people are reporting Linux "blackouts", which
cannot be traced because they were running X or such, I'd suggest to raise
the priority of inclusion of serial console support into the mainstream
kernel. This way, you can connect a dumb terminal, a second PC, a serial
printer, whatever to your PC and you'll get very nice printk logs even if
the text console is inaccessible and remains inaccessible after the crash.

Miquel van Smoorenburg has implemented a comprehensive and nicely
integrated serial console system. If he feels that it is stable enough,
it would be good if that could go into the kernel as soon as possible. If
he has doubts, one could also consider using my minimalistic patches
(which are rather well-tested on SCSI systems, but may conceivably trouble
IDE if printk is invoked with interrupts truned off) as an interim
solution.

It may also be a good idea to set DEFAULT_MESSAGE_LOGLEVEL to 0 for a while
to make sure that a system will print everything interesting by default
even if klogd is running.

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, DI-LRC,EPFL,CH   werner.almesberger@lrc.di.epfl.ch /
/_IN_R_311__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/