Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:56:42 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:56:42 -0500 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:8714 "EHLO www.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:56:41 -0500 Message-ID: <3DC19A4C.40908@pobox.com> Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:02:04 -0500 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linus Torvalds CC: "Matt D. Robinson" , Rusty Russell , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, lkcd-general@lists.sourceforge.net, lkcd-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: What's left over. References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1645 Lines: 41 Linus Torvalds wrote: > In particular when it comes to this project, I'm told about > "netdump", which doesn't try to dump to a disk, but over the net. > And quite frankly, my immediate reaction is to say "Hell, I > _never_ want the dump touching my disk, but over the network > sounds like a great idea". > > [yes, I realize the LKCD merge debate is over, bear with me :)] I'm sort of in the middle on this issue: The existence of netdump does not imply that disk dumps are a bad thing. netdumps require a net dump server, and it is simply not realistic at all to assume that users seeing crashes will always have a netdump server set up in advance, or even have multiple machines to make that possible. Disk dumps are valuable because their requirements are very low, and because of all the user-support reasons that Andrew Morton mentioned in this thread. That said, I used to be an LKCD cheerleader until a couple people made some good points to me: it is not nearly low-level enough to truly be of use in crash situations. netdump can work if your interrupts are hosed/screaming, and various mid-layers are dying. For LKCD to be of any use, it needs to _skip_ the block layer and talk directly to low-level drivers. So, I think the stock kernel does need some form of disk dumping, regardless of any presence/absence of netdump. But LKCD isn't there yet... Jeff - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/