Re: Black box flight recorder for Linux

[Krzysztof Halasa <khc@pm.waw.pl>]

James Courtier-Dutton <James@superbug.co.uk> writes:

> Now, the question I have is, if I write values to RAM, do any of those
> values survive a reset? If any did survive, one could use them to
> store oops output in. I am currently only interested in Intel CPU and
> AMD CPU based motherboards. If only some values survived, one could
> use some sort of redundant encoding so the good values could be
> recovered.
>
> The main advantage of something like this would be for newer
> motherboards that are around now that don't have a serial port.

Interesting idea.

I think the most trivial and reliable way would be to solder some
I^2 or similar EEPROM chip to, for example, parallel port connector.

Most motherboards have an internal I^2C bus / SMBus (for reading RAM
types and for other things) and I think it could be used to connect
the EEPROM instead of external port.

There are 512 Kbit (64 KB) and 1 Mbit (128 KB) EEPROMs available -
there is plenty of space not only for crash dump but for whole dmesg.
-- 
Krzysztof Halasa