Oops in flash

Oops in flash

[Guennadi Liakhovetski]

Hello

There once was a patch to the kernel to save Oops to diskets. I've done a
similar thing - for flash. You just reserve a small (smallest, normally,
128K) partition on flash and, when an Oops happens, it is just written to
it. Reasoning is simple - one can't always attach a serial console to all
systems, and not all bugs are so simple to reproduce. Then one could
write an init-script co check this partition, and if it not clean - save
contents and erase.

The patch is small and simple, one just has to find a suitable place for
it. Also, we don't set the oops_in_progress variable on ARM - it can be
quite nicely used for this purpose. Should we do it regardless?

If there is interest, I could clean it up and send to the list, although,
it is really trivial.

CC-ing to LKML, because other embedded (and not so embedded) systems might
also find this idea useful.

Yes, it is not so simple, if the oops happens in or during another access
to flash - I don't handle this...

Guennadi
---------------------------------
Guennadi Liakhovetski, Ph.D.
DSA Daten- und Systemtechnik GmbH
Pascalstr. 28
D-52076 Aachen
Germany

Re: Oops in flash

[Russell King]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 05:53:00PM +0100, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> The patch is small and simple, one just has to find a suitable place for
> it. Also, we don't set the oops_in_progress variable on ARM - it can be
> quite nicely used for this purpose. Should we do it regardless?

2.6 ARM kernels do set this variable on oops.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:  2.6 PCMCIA      - http://pcmcia.arm.linux.org.uk/
                 2.6 Serial core

Re: Oops in flash

[Russell King]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 05:53:00PM +0100, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
> CC-ing to LKML, because other embedded (and not so embedded) systems might
> also find this idea useful.

Also, please note that because the linux-arm* lists are poster-moderated,
it is _not_ a good idea to cross-post between those lists and LKML.

Please refrain from doing so in the future.

-- 
Russell King
 Linux kernel    2.6 ARM Linux   - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
 maintainer of:  2.6 PCMCIA      - http://pcmcia.arm.linux.org.uk/
                 2.6 Serial core