Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 19 Jan 1998 16:57:43 -0500 (EST) | From | John Alvord <> | Subject | Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals? |
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On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Dan Hollis wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jan 1998, Richard Guy Briggs wrote: > > > Thats all I can think of right now.. I'm sure there are many more things > > > that I would feel nessassary in a 3.0 release.. I'm sure others can add.. > > How about a kernel panic core memory dump to disk for forensic research? > > The current logic behind not doing this in linux is that since its > impossible to do it perfectly (e.g. 100% foolproof under all situations), > it shouldnt be done at all. (Still, BSD manages to do it). > A couple weeks ago, Linus stated quite clearly that he disliked crash dumps because they led to a style of fault repair which often fixed the symptom instead of fixing the problem. By giving less information, a programmer was forced to understand the problem, instead of patching it away.
I understand that viewpoint. I have seen my sahre of lousey fixes.
On the other side, a crash dump can be extremely useful in tracking down ill-system situations. The system is running slower and slower... or everything is stopped but the mouse... or a storage creep has eaten up half the storage in a week. A crash dump, with suitable diagnostics, can reveal problem situations which do not result in immediate faults.
I think a crash dump facility would help accelerate progress in solving the more mature problems which are showing up recently.
john alvord
p.s. I spent years on a dump analysis tool in a former life.
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