Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 3 Jul 1999 09:14:06 +0200 | From | Pavel Machek <> | Subject | Re: The stability crisis |
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Hi!
> > No. Dumping to on-disk partition is _very_ risky, because it is easy > > to miss the right partition. Floppy is much safer because it is much > > harder to hit harddisk this way. > > In theory, when a system is "oopsing", it is unsafe to do anything. > > In practise, I agree with you that writing to a harddisk is more > dangerous than writing to a floppy. > > On the other hand, having a system control (ioctl on a file?, sysctl?, > /proc?) that tells the system: "Please use that for crash dumps", and > requires the file to be appropriately sized and preallocated would, in > my opinion, be safe enough. Once the system thinks: "this is going the > wrong way", it should write out the messages buffer to the > pre-determined blocks. > > If those pre-determined block numbers are wrong (random pointer), then > it is most likely that lots of other stuff was broken first, so that > writing to disk is no longer possible.
If you took a look at that floppy writer patch, it was _very_ clever. It basically took machine down to real mode and then done I/O using bios. I think that floppy-oopser patch is safe (as long as ROM is ROM :-).
Anything what stores block numbers relies on our i/o drivers to work. Going through bios looks much more reliable. Pavel -- I'm really pavel@ucw.cz. Look at http://195.113.31.123/~pavel. Pavel Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature, please!
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