Re: The stability crisis

Chuck Lever (cel@monkey.org)
Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:43:52 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 1 Jul 1999, Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> That's pretty much been my experience. 2.2.10 crashes on a regular
> basis. Certainly more than previous kernels. Why? Who's to say? It
> leaves behind no information. Nothing in the logs, nothing in dmesg
> (which changes with each boot up, anyhow). There's no way to try the
> magic SysRq key, as the keyboard is completely locked up. I can't
> telnet/ssh/ftp/ping the box, as it evidently stops processing all
> network requests. In short, there is absolutely no indication, not the
> slightest oops or byte left over, to even begin to give the inkling of a
> clue about why the system crashed.

i've seen the same problem on a quad Dell PE6300 running stock 2.2.9 (no
quotas, egcs-built, AIC7xxx SCSI driver). the machine hangs solid. i
haven't had a chance to poke around to see what's up; we just started
seeing these a few days ago, and it's a test machine.

having a nice integrated kernel debugger like SGI's kdb would be great
to resolve problems like these. the patch to dump an oops to a floppy is
also good, but would it be possible to dump it to a file or a small
partition on an internal disk instead? Linus, including a feature like
that would make it a whole lot easier to get high quality oops reports to
developers.

- Chuck Lever

--
corporate:	<chuckl@netscape.com>
personal:	<chucklever@netscape.net> or <cel@monkey.org>


The Linux Scalability project:
	http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/linux-scalability/




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