On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 07:12:29PM -0600, Ronald G Minnich wrote:
>
> > Or is it more tightly coupled to a
> > hardware reset?
>
> no. The only implication of hardware reset is that on some machines
> refresh stops for a while. That's it.
But hardware reset will also reset the chipset, all pci devices, and
probably any other peripheral attached to the system. So while I think
you could get back to a point where you could read back what was in ram
when it crashed, I doubt you'd ever be able to actually restart a running
system because that would imply that all the devices were put back in the
same state, which can't happen because the hardware reset lost all the
hardware setup.
So maybe you could do some neat post-crash debugging, or recover the most
recent pending filesystem writes, but I have doubts that "restarting" the
crashed system would ever happen.
Still, I think the original question was basically "would linuxbios be a
good environment to develop this sort of thing under?" and I think the
answer to that is a definite "yes".
Hey, I bet people would be impressed if you could just come up with a
simple kernel panic recovery method, where linuxbios could detect the
residue (oops data stashed in the log buffer or hidden somewhere else in
ram), and preserve it for later debugging.
Eric
