Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 6 May 1999 08:30:20 +0200 (MET DST) | From | David Weinehall <> | Subject | Re: Oops assist... |
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On Thu, 6 May 1999, Manfred Spraul wrote:
> Philipp Rumpf wrote: > > > > > i.e. the Oops is dumped to the first (after the header) sector of the > > > swap file. The computer is restarted automatically. I don't > > > think that it a good idea to continue after an Oops: > > > if you kill a kernel thread, then you have memory corruptions, > > > lost spinlocks, lost semaphores: the computer will crash in a few > > > seconds anyway. > > > > *Bzzzt*. It is actually good we do not die on oopses. they are a convenient > > way to test drivers, and the most common oops cause (dereferenced NULL pointer) > > does not cause memory corruption. > > This oops does not cause a memory corruption, it is often caused by a > previous > memory corruption... > > I don't agree because: > a) spinlocks & semaphores are still a big problem. This problem gets > bigger > as we further deserialize the kernel. > b) if you test drivers, it would be possible to use the old behaviour: > the problem is that if you have a oops on a production machine, then > you don't know what happened, i.e. internal ext2 structures could be > corrupted, and if you don't restart immediately, then you risk that > the harddisk gets corrupted further, or wrong data could be sent over > the network. Look at a journaling filesystem: it can recover quickly, > because it knows that all incomplete writes are described in the log: > if one sector write is lost, and the computer crashes 60 seconds later, > then the fsck will not be able to detect the error by examining the log.
Wouldn't it be quite reasonable to make "Reboot on Oops" an config-option or a sysctl?
/David Weinehall _ _ // David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /> Northern lights wander \\ // Project MCA Linux hacker // Dance across the winter sky // \> http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ </ Full colour fire </
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