[ANNOUNCE] firescope for i386/x86-64 released

[Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de>]

[This has been on ftp for some time but I didn't get around to announce it]

I ported Ben Herrenschmidt's firescope tool to i386/x86-64 and did
some changes. It allows to read memory from a target over firewire.
All you need is a fitting firewire cable and two machines with firewire 
port and ohci1394 firewire controllers.

There's no xmon on x86-64, so it's primarily to read the dmesg log buffer
(but it can read arbitary memory).  It's very useful to get
kernel logs out of machines without serial port like laptops.

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/ak/firescope/firescope-0.1.tar.gz

See the manpage in the package for more details.

Limitations: 
- raw1394 needs to be loaded on the host
- Host needs to run ohci1394 first. This means it currently
cannot be used to capture very early oopses.
- Host needs to be same bitsize as target. You can use a 32bit 
binary (firescope32 as generated by the Makefile), but you need
2.6.17rc1 for the compat support
- The tty output inserts too many newlines.
- Under high load auto update mode sometimes gets confused
(it is hard to do this without any locking)

-Andi