On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 10:00:08 +1000 Nigel Cunningham wrote: > Hi. > > On Wednesday 14 June 2006 09:46, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, David Brownell wrote: > > > Here's a related patch (well, "hack") I found helpful ... specifically to > > > help let _serial_ consoles be more useful. > > > > I just checked. > > > > I think exactly _two_ of the six machines I have around my desk have > > serial ports, and of those two, one is permanently turned off because it's > > old, noisy, and just not interesting. > > > > Maybe I'm more progressive than most, but I personally consider serial > > lines pretty much dead. > > Usb to serial converters are not completely unheard of, though. My old > omnibook even came with one. It's the one bit I still use :) and usb serial-console works, although not during early init (it has to wait for the usb subsystem to be ready). > > > Although I must say I like Nigel's "BDI-2000 per developer" hack better. > > > Even though not all boxes can hook up to a JTAG module. :( > > > > Umm. Even more importantly, I don't think the JTAG interfaces for PC's are > > necessarily even available. There is read-out logic for ARM's and embedded > > PPC, but have you ever seen anything for something non-embedded? > > Yeah. Sort of kills that idea, doesn't it? > > > A really useful trick the PPC people use was to put the firewire > > controller into "anybody can read" mode, and use it as a kernel debugger > > when it basically becomes a remote memory DMA engine. I used that to debug > > some kernel hangs, and it was very nice. > > > > However, that won't survive a power event, so it might be useful to debug > > suspend problems, but generally not resume problems. > > Since just about every problem occurs at resume time, it really does seem to > me to be the case that we have to use the rtc. Great idea, by the way. --- ~Randy
