On Fri, 06 May 2005 17:32:11 PDT, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Gerrit Huizenga <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > [ ... ]
> >
>
> But you didn't address the question of whether the kexec feature is
> sufficiently useful in its own right to justify merging.
Yeah - I skirted that. I like kexec by itself for quick reboots but
I honestly haven't used it much for that. I am *really* interested
in kdump + kexec, and kdump depends on kexec. Working with two moving
targets has been a bit more challenging, hence I'd prefer to see kexec
stable as a provider technology so we can address the bugs and build
the kdump support on top.
> > If it takes a little list or test matrix of platforms tested over the
> > short term to help verify what machines work, we might be able to set
> > something like that up as well.
>
> Yes, please do that. But remember that Linux has a distributed test team
> of thousands. I have a separate proposal:
I'll see if we can find a way to make this happen - even tracking
a little web page of "My IBM T41p successfully ran kexec" or "My
G5 ran kexec" would be useful info, I think as a starting point.
Something like:
Hardware Ran kexec Ran kdump Kdump was useful
should be enough to record some success, as at least a starting point.
> My big checkbox for kdump is "can I personally use kdump to diagnose and
> solve testers' bug reports?".
Now *this* I completely agree with. That is the ultimate goal. And,
we've had challenges with this internally because kexec & kdump have
been under so much churn. We have a grid of machines for testing, and
I *know* we get a bunch of Oopses during development. We have someone
looking into integrating kexec/kdump into that environment so that every
Ooops leads to a crash dump. It has been rough going with kexec & kdump
in churn, so stabilizing will actually help us with this.
> If we can reach the stage where a random person downloads a -mm kernel,
> hits a bug and, with a reasonable success rate, can send me a kernel core
> file which I find useful then yeah, it's proven.
Completely agreed.
> Problem is, I haven't gotten around to moving this idea an inch forward and
> am unlikely to do so.
Understood. We'll do what we can from our end but as always, help from
any quarter is appreciated.
> It would really help if some of the kdump developers could assist: make
> sure the instructions are easy, that the tools are available, work with
> people on the mailing list to get a core file from them, then, using the
> core file, work with the relevant maintainer to identify and solve the bug.
> We did this a few weeks ago with the -mm timer deadlock. Off-list, I think.
>
> Possible?
Yes. I'll push this a little more on Monday from our side and maybe we
can get a little independent help/verification from Randy, Eric, etc.
gerrit
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
