Re: silly [< >] and other excess

Albert D. Cahalan
2000-11-23T03:25:11Z

Russell King writes:
> Albert D. Cahalan writes:

>> All these numbers get looked up.
>
> These numbers should NOT get looked up - if they are, then very
> useful information will be lost;

WOAH, STOP!!! You say "lost"???

Under NO circumstances should klogd or ksymoops mangle the
original oops. The raw oops data MUST be completely preserved.
It is a serious bug that this is not what currently happens.

> they are not only references to
> kernel functions, but also kernel data and read only data within
> the kernel text segment.

1. this is harmless
2. this is useful (you might get a variable's name)

> The result will be a totally undeciperal
> garbage.

Nope. You get the unmolested oops and some symbol data.
If there isn't any symbol for 0x424a5149, so what? It is
no big deal to look up a few opcodes in the symbol table
by accident.

> Again, care to put the effort into klogd/ksymoops to handle the
> architecture special cases?

That would be trading one design flaw for another.

The hard part of klogd/ksymoops is decoding the code bytes AFAIK.
The rest is a just a cross between grep and ps -- you search and
you do symbol lookups. I could throw it together in a few hours,
minus the disassembly part.

Hey, anybody ever think about splitting the kernel message buffer
to be per-CPU or keeping interrupt context separate from process
context? Not that I've looked at it, but locking might be reduced.