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To: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: What's left over. 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 01 Nov 2002 20:37:56 -0000."
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Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2002 23:25:03 -0300
From: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@eeyore.valparaiso.cl>
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Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> said:

[...]

> I dealt with crash dumps quite a lot over 10 years with SCO UNIX,
> OpenServer and UnixWare: which were addressing the PC market, not
> own hardware.

What I remember about hardware compatibility for SCO Unix and Solaris on
ia32 is _not_ funny. Lightyears from what Linux handles today without
breaking a sweat.

> It's a real worry that writing a crash dump to disk might stomp in the
> wrong place, but I don't recall it ever happening in practice.  But
> occasionally, yes, a dump was not generated at all, or not completed.

How do you test that? Not in some contrieved situation, under real crashes.
Don't just consider crashes in the official $DISTRIBUTION kernel, but in
Linus' BK tree, or some of the random, two-or-three-letter-trees of the day
(_that_ is where crashes happen, _that_ is where the info would be most
valuable). It gets _real_ hairy _real_ fast to make sure you don't scribble
over /home or /etc on the user's disk...

> Of course, you could argue that SCO's disk drivers were more stable :-)

If you only handle a few, thoroughly tested, high-end controllers and
disks, that is not too hard to do.
--
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile                Fax:  +56 32 797513
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