Re: -mm -> 2.6.13 merge status

Martin J. Bligh
2005-06-22T07:51:59Z

--Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> wrote (on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 14:04:41 -0700):

> Gerrit Huizenga <gh@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>>
>> Kexec/kdump has a chance of working reliably.
>
> IOW: Kexec/kdump has a chance of not working reliably.
>
> Worried.

Personally I'm more concerned about the design issues - I can't see how
any of the other options are sustainable / workable. Things that require
maintaining their own driver base are just insane. Things that dump from
the panicing kernel are just broken. People want to be able to dump to
disk / network / flash-ram card / god-knows-what, so we need something
that's flexible.

I don't think kdump is perfect and bug-free yet, but at least it has a
design that looks like it'll be workable and sustainable through the future.
Plus it's a small patch on top of kexec, which is useful in it's own right
(for fast reboot, etc) so we get to reuse a lot of code.

We could go into how crashdump itself is important (eg. first time failure
capture is critical for customers, less downtime, I can ship you better
data on bugs I find in test, etc, etc) but I kind of assumed most people
were convinced of that by now. Even Linus seemed to think kdump was the
sensible way forward (at KS last year), and he seems to be one of the
most ardent sceptics of crashdump I've ever met ;-)

M.