On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 12:00:53AM +1000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > A friend at Sun remarked that supporting Linux at the enterprise level > is much harder than supporting Solaris, mainly because Linux has no > crash dump facility. That is, when Solaris crashes, it leaves a dump > file in the swap area, so that at the next boot, the dump file can be > stored away in /var or wherever, for later diagnosis of the kernel and > what went wrong. > > Having lived through a few Linux panics, I have to agree that it has > nothing like this - it has something only marginally better than > Windows NT's blue screen of death. (At least Linux has ksymoops so > that after you have laboriously copied down a text screen full of hex > numbers, and then typed them in, you can at least get some symbolic > debug info. So it's better than Windows, but it's a painful process.)
Usually they get dumped to /var/log/messages if the system isn't too far gone, so that you often don't need to write anything down. > Does anyone know whether something more like Solaris's kind of facility > is being planned for Linux? I seem to recall various patches at different times; try searching the kt.zork.net Kernel Traffic archives. I think people have implemented everything from dumping to a file on disk, prompting for a floppy and dumping to that, and providing live debugging over a serial link... whether any of these will ever make it into the main kernel or even a vendor-supplied kernel is a different matter ;) Linus' view on kernel debugging aids seems to be that anything more than a register and stack dump is too much hassle for too little gain. Registers and stack already give you the bulk of what you want to know (assuming the symbols have been decoded by ksymoops, of course), which is what the kernel was doing at the time it died. Others have disagreed... I once tried to keep up with the linux-kernel list, but I just couldn't keep it up. These days I just read kt.zork.net and lwn.net for my kernel news. -Andrew. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
