Re: Linux kdb (was Re: first thread)

[Philipp Rumpf <prumpf@jcsbs.lanobis.de>]

On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 02:54:57PM +0000, Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Philipp Rumpf wrote:
> > > 1. crash(1) to analyse those (dumps not humans) in 0. as well as playing
> > > with live /dev/mem.
> > The name sounds a bit strange to me ...
> Why so? crash(1) (or crash(1M) if you are pedantically ATT-ish) is a
> standard UNIX command present in most UNIX variants.

The name is frightening for the average user, especially if the manpage mentions
it does things with kernel memory. I do not think that most of the people we
want to report bugs have had lots of experience with UNIX before.

> The only problem with Linux is that it is so good and flexible that things
> normally done with crash in several hours, in Linux are done in seconds by
> just catting some files in /proc or reading the sources... That puts
> people off writing crash(1) for Linux, probably.

Well, I thought we were talking about post mortem debugging. I think a lot
of panics / deadly oopses are not reported because people do not really enjoy
copying a longish Oops message by hand, feeding it to ksymoops and reporting
it to linux-kernel.

We could really do with a more user-friendly alternative, which is what a
dump partition, some utilities aso. could give us.

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