[PATCH] make Documentation/oops-tracing.txt relevant to 2.6 [was Re: OOPS running "ls -l /sys/class/i2c-adapter/*"-- 2.6.12-rc1-mm2]

Lee Revell
2005-03-25T21:46:12Z

On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 21:07 +0000, Russell King wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 03:53:42PM -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 07:38 +0000, Russell King wrote:
> > > Users need to be re-educated _not_ to use ksymoops.
> >
> > How about changing the fscking docs to not tell users to use it?
>
> Would be useful. The "fscking" problem is that no one actually owns the
> documents, so there's no central focus to keep them up to date.
>

Are you serious? So Documentation/sound/alsa/* isn't maintained by the
ALSA maintainers?

Wow, this would explain why all Linux documentation is at least 2 years
out of date.

> Maybe we need a docfsck? 8)
>
> I certainly don't have authority to tell x86 people not to use ksymoops.
> Therefore, I think my suggested change (which up until recently I thought
> was an ARM only problem) should be done by someone else.
>

At least from my experience, ksymoops is useless on x86 for 2.6 kernels.
Here is a patch to finally bring oops-tracing.txt into the 2.6 era. :-P

Sugned-Off-By: Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>

Lee

--- Documentation/oops-tracing.txt~ 2005-03-17 20:34:06.000000000 -0500
+++ Documentation/oops-tracing.txt 2005-03-25 16:41:07.000000000 -0500
@@ -1,23 +1,22 @@
+NOTE: ksymoops is useless on 2.6. Please use the Oops in its original format
+(from dmesg, etc). Ignore any references in this or other docs to "decoding
+the Oops" or "running it through ksymoops". If you post an Oops fron 2.6 that
+has been run through ksymoops, people will just tell you to repost it.
+
Quick Summary
-------------

-Install ksymoops from
-ftp://ftp.<country>.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/ksymoops
-Read the ksymoops man page.
-ksymoops < the_oops.txt
-
-and send the output the maintainer of the kernel area that seems to be
-involved with the problem, not to the ksymoops maintainer. Don't worry
-too much about getting the wrong person. If you are unsure send it to
-the person responsible for the code relevant to what you were doing.
-If it occurs repeatably try and describe how to recreate it. Thats
-worth even more than the oops
+Find the Oops and send it to the maintainer of the kernel area that seems to be
+involved with the problem. Don't worry too much about getting the wrong person.
+If you are unsure send it to the person responsible for the code relevant to
+what you were doing. If it occurs repeatably try and describe how to recreate
+it. That's worth even more than the oops.

If you are totally stumped as to whom to send the report, send it to
linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org. Thanks for your help in making Linux as
stable as humanly possible.

-Where is the_oops.txt?
+Where is the Oops?
----------------------

Normally the Oops text is read from the kernel buffers by klogd and
@@ -43,15 +42,14 @@
them yourself. Search kernel archives for kmsgdump, lkcd and
oops+smram.

-No matter how you capture the log output, feed the resulting file to
-ksymoops along with /proc/ksyms and /proc/modules that applied at the
-time of the crash. /var/log/ksymoops can be useful to capture the
-latter, man ksymoops for details.
-

Full Information
----------------

+NOTE: the message from Linus below applies to 2.4 kernel. I have preserved it
+for historical reasons, and because some of the information in it still
+applies. Especially, please ignore any references to ksymoops.
+
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

How to track down an Oops.. [originally a mail to linux-kernel]