On Fri, 25 May 2007, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> There is an additional factor - dumps contain data which variously is -
> copyright third parties, protected by privacy laws, just personally
> private, security sensitive (eg browser history) and so on.
Yes.
I'm sure we've had one or two crashdumps over the years that have actually
clarified a bug.
But I seriously doubt it is more than a handful.
> Diskdump (and even more so netdump) are useful in the hands of a
> developer crashing their own box just like kgdb, but not in the the
> normal and rational end user response of "its broken, hit reset"
Amen, brother.
Even for developers, I suspect a _lot_ of people end up doing "ok, let's
bisect this" or some other method to narrow it down to a specific case,
and then staring at the source code once they get to that point.
At least I hope so. Even in user space, you should generally use gdb to
get a traceback and perhaps variable information, and then go look at the
source code.
Yes, dumps can (in theory) be useful for one-off issues, but I doubt many
people have ever been able to get anything much more out of them than from
a kernel "oops" message.
For developers, I can heartily recommend the firewire-based remote debug
facilities that the PowerPC people use. I've used it once or twice, and it
is fairly simple and much better than a full dump (adn it works even when
the CPU is totally locked up, which is the best reason for using it).
But 99% of the time, the problem doesn't happen on a developer machine,
and even if it does, 90% of the time you really just want the traceback
and register info that you get out of an oops.
Linus
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