Re: Faster reboots (and a better way of taking crashdumps?)

Martin J. Bligh
2002-04-06T01:49:18Z

> for 2, the BIOS sets the hardware to a known state,
> or if you can trigger *the* hardware reset line,
> which will also do that, then you're going through
> the BIOS again. Now if you made your own bios...
> see www.linuxbios.org.

I need to avoid going through the BIOS ... this is a
multiquad NUMA machine, and it doesn't take kindly
to the reboot through the BIOS for various reasons.
It also takes about 4 minutes, which is a pain ;-)

I have source code access to our BIOS if I really wanted,
I just want to avoid modifying it if possible.

> there are patches where a kernel can load another
> kernel, also.

Hmmm ... sounds interesting ... any pointers?

> As for taking crashdumps on the way up, I believe
> (SGI's ?) linux kernel crash dumps does *exactly*
> this.

I was under the impression that most BIOSes reset
memory on reboot, so this was impossible during a
BIOS reboot?

M.