Matthew Gregan wrote:
At 2004-08-09T15:14:58+1200, Sascha Beaumont wrote:Like going back in time...! I've not got any tty43's left any more - they were the best for this - with the system console on the serial port.
Derek Smithies wrote:
Hi, You can redirect kernel output to the serial port.
hook another machine up to the serial port and run your favourite tool to catch all the text/info..
Dot matrix printer anyone? Just keep a vivid handy to erase logs, and
earplugs so you don't go deaf during a portscan.
I beleive there are some patches (which might be in 2.6 now) for console
over ethernet, a tad faster than serial or a dotmatrix.
Yeah, there are lots of solution floating around: Linux Kernel Crash Dumps (crash to swap like the BSDs and commercial UNIX systems have been doing for years), console (and memory dump) over Ethernet, firewiring DMA debugging, etc., etc. There's not much of this stuff in the mainline kernel, or in the vendor-distributed kernels, yet.
The reason that the BSOD style solution is nice for desktop end users is that it's easy to get hold of the panic output--it's right there, on screen.
You can't expect end users to run their Linux consoles to a printer, over serial, or over Ethernet in the hope that they'll catch a crash. On the other hand, the other solutions are far more suitable for remote management of Linux, where a BSOD can become an annoying reason to visit the datacentre.
Cheers,
-mjg
Steve
