Messages in this thread | | | From | John Bradford <> | Subject | Crash dumping | Date | Sat, 15 Mar 2003 08:46:06 +0000 (GMT) |
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Just wondering, we've had a lot of discussions in the past about various serial port/network/disk crash dumping ideas, and always had the problem of how do we know that the code we're about the execute hasn't been corrupted, etc, which is especially important in the case of the disk dumper.
Well, with the Linux BIOS project, couldn't we include some code in the BIOS that we can jump to after a kernel crash, I.E. just switch to real mode and start executing the BIOS-contained code to put the system in to a sane state, and accept commands over the network[1] via either UDP, or a custom protocol, to dump memory to disk, network, or whatever?
Internet IMPs had loader/dumpers to do this kind of thing 30 years ago, and I don't see why we can't ressurect the idea today.
[1] Obviously the code in the BIOS will be hard coded to work with whatever network card you have, I.E. you would need to program the right driver in to the BIOS for your particular card, and store the machine's I.P. there as well, (and a password, or a list of local I.P.s that were trusted - the idea being that you connect to the machine via another machine on the LAN, not directly the internet directly).
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