lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2010]   [Dec]   [17]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: [concept & "good taste" review] persistent store
From
Date
On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 10:09 -0800, Tony Luck wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Tony Luck <tony.luck@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The _only_ valid reason for persistent storage is for things like
> >> oopses that kill the machine.
> >
> > Maybe I misunderstood what "KMSG_DUMP_OOPS" meant ... it
> > looked to me like this code is used for non-fatal OOPsen - ones
> > that will be logged to /var/log/messages.
>
> Thinking about this a bit more I see my experiments with
> this were hopelessly naive. There is no way to know at
> "oops" time whether the problem is going to turn out to
> be minor or fatal. So the right thing to do here is assume
> the worst and squirrel the data away safely just in case
> death is imminent.

To be honest, this is what I'd recommend even if you could tell the
difference. A lot of the oopses I see were triggered by something
non-fatal (usually a WARN_ON()) earlier in the sequence. Without seeing
the preceding WARN_ON() data, the oops is usually terrifically hard to
diagnose (often just a NULL or junk pointer deref).

James




\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2010-12-17 19:21    [W:0.075 / U:0.364 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site