Re: silly [< >] and other excess

Albert D. Cahalan
2000-11-23T00:04:27Z

Keith Owens writes:
> Christian Gennerat <christian.gennerat@vz.cit.alcatel.fr> wrote:
>> Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl a =E9crit :

>>> I also left something else
>>> that always annoyed me: valuable screen space (on a 24x80 vt)
>>> is lost by these silly [< >] around addresses in an Oops.
>>> They provide no information at all, but on the other hand
>>> cause loss of information because these lines no longer
>>> fit in 80 columns causing line wrap and the loss of the
>>> top of the Oops.]

> You just broke ksymoops.

You can fix it. Keeping useful info on the screen is more important.

> Removing the [< >] is a bad idea, they are
> one of the few things that identifies the addresses in the log,
> otherwise they just look like hex numbers. ksymoops has to scan log
> files which can contain anything and somehow pick out the interesting
> lines, you need some identifier on the lines.

If you see register names followed by hex numbers, you have
some debug data. Scan forward and backward 25 lines, grabbing
all 8-digit and 16-digit hex numbers. Sort the numbers, then
look up all of them.

Crude solutions don't break as often as fancy solutions.

> There should be no need to restrict the number of lines printed, it is
> limited by the top of the kernel stack. If there are more than 32
> trace entries on the stack then they should be printed.

It could fill the screen. There is an expansion of 4-to-13 when
using the silly brackets, and a PC stack can be 6 or 7 kB long,
or perhaps many megabytes due to stack overflow. The standard
VGA screen only allows 4000 bytes of data.