On Fri, 25 May 2007, Alan Cox wrote: > > There is an additional factor - dumps contain data which variously is - > copyright third parties, protected by privacy laws, just personally > private, security sensitive (eg browser history) and so on. Yes. I'm sure we've had one or two crashdumps over the years that have actually clarified a bug. But I seriously doubt it is more than a handful. > Diskdump (and even more so netdump) are useful in the hands of a > developer crashing their own box just like kgdb, but not in the the > normal and rational end user response of "its broken, hit reset" Amen, brother. Even for developers, I suspect a _lot_ of people end up doing "ok, let's bisect this" or some other method to narrow it down to a specific case, and then staring at the source code once they get to that point. At least I hope so. Even in user space, you should generally use gdb to get a traceback and perhaps variable information, and then go look at the source code. Yes, dumps can (in theory) be useful for one-off issues, but I doubt many people have ever been able to get anything much more out of them than from a kernel "oops" message. For developers, I can heartily recommend the firewire-based remote debug facilities that the PowerPC people use. I've used it once or twice, and it is fairly simple and much better than a full dump (adn it works even when the CPU is totally locked up, which is the best reason for using it). But 99% of the time, the problem doesn't happen on a developer machine, and even if it does, 90% of the time you really just want the traceback and register info that you get out of an oops. Linus _______________________________________________ linux-pm mailing list linux-pm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-pm
