Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751095AbWAEKds (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jan 2006 05:33:48 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752130AbWAEKds (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jan 2006 05:33:48 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]:42953 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751095AbWAEKdr (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Jan 2006 05:33:47 -0500 Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 05:33:39 -0500 From: Dave Jones To: Jan Engelhardt Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: oops pauser. Message-ID: <20060105103339.GG20809@redhat.com> Mail-Followup-To: Dave Jones , Jan Engelhardt , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <20060105045212.GA15789@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2587 Lines: 59 On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 09:15:02AM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > Here's something interesting too: > Sometimes, an oops is even longer than 25 rows, and the usual user > does not have > - VGA mode with a lot of lines (because it's hard to read) > - FB mode with a lot of lines (slow, and it's also hard to read) See the other patch I sent which halves the amount of lines needed for a backtrace on i386 (like x86-64 uses). This helps too. > Is it be possible to change the VGA mode to 80x43/80x50/80x60 > during protected mode? After an oops, we can't really rely on anything. What if the oops came from the console layer, or a framebuffer driver? > >With this patch, if we oops, there's a pause for a two minutes.. > >which hopefully gives people enough time to grab a digital camera > >to take a screenshot of the oops. > > > It would be ideal to have something like BSD's "dump to predefined > block device on oops", so extraction of oops logs requires neither > pen-and-paper nor a digital camera. Requires another partition that > can be used for it, though. I dislike most of the disk dump patches that I've seen out there because most of them rely on the system being in a decent enough state to be able to write out blocks of data. If I had any faith in the sturdyness of the floppy driver, I'd recommend someone looked into a 'dump oops to floppy' patch, but it too relies on a large part of the system being in a sane enough state to write blocks out to disk. > (*) If the oops is longer than 25 lines, ... you can't even use scrollback > because scrollback is cleared when you change consoles. X runs by default > on tty7, and the kernel dumps it somewhere else. (And even if it dumped to > tty7 directly, you would not see it.) What to do about oopses whilst in X has been the subject of much head-scratching for years now. It's come up at least at the last two kernel summits, and I'll hazard a guess it'll come up again this year. The amount of work necessary to make it all work on both kernel side and X side isn't unsubstantial however, so I wouldn't count on it working too soon. Hmm, SuSE/Novell folks, doesn't NKLD take over an X display? ISTR during a demo at last years OLS the presenter was flipping in/out of the debugger between slides. Is there anything useful there ? Dave - 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/