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@xxxxxxxxx> 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 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
