Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:19:02 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org> Cc: cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha support.s src/sys/i386/i386 swtch.s src/sys/kern kern_shutdown.c src/sys/sys systm.h Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1040120221452.53972J-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <200401210307.i0L37s7E060437@gw.catspoiler.org>
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On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Don Lewis wrote: > It would be extremely helpful to preserve the panic message and > (optionally) the backtrace across the reboot. Crash dumps may not > always be possible for any number of reasons (swap smaller than RAM, > /var/crash too small or overflowing with previous crash dumps, crash > dump takes too long ...). This is especially true in cases where the > machine crashes and reboots unattended. Actually, I was having a very similar conversation with Bill Paul this afternoon. We were discussing dropping a copy of the kernel message buffer onto the header of swap space on panic, if possible, and then dropping them in /var/log/crash.log for management by newsyslog. Then the natural response to "My machine spontaneously reboots" becomes "Look for something recent in /var/log/crash.log", as opposed to "You'll need to enable crash dumps, set up a serial console", etc. It's also something we could turn on by default, as opposed to crash dumps, which would otherwise consume of alot of disk space. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert@fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
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