Black box flight recorder for Linux

James Courtier-Dutton
2006-04-08T11:13:05Z

Hi,

I have had an idea for a black box flight recorder type feature for
Linux. Before I try to implement it, I just wish to ask here if anyone
has already tried it, and whether the idea works or not.

Description for feature:
Stamp the dmesg output on RAM somewhere, so that after a reset (reset
button pressed, not power off), the RAM can be read and details of
oopses etc. can be read.

Now, the question I have is, if I write values to RAM, do any of those
values survive a reset? If any did survive, one could use them to store
oops output in. I am currently only interested in Intel CPU and AMD CPU
based motherboards. If only some values survived, one could use some
sort of redundant encoding so the good values could be recovered.

The main advantage of something like this would be for newer
motherboards that are around now that don't have a serial port.

If no one has tried this, I will spend some time testing.

James