Garrett D'Amore writes:
> yi zhang - Sun Microsystems - Beijing China wrote:
> > So is there any other way worth trying? such as direct call NIC card 
> > driver without multi-thread?
> 
> Its not just multi-threading, but interrupts (or lack thereof) that you 
> have to be concerned with.  If you can identify the ISR handler for the 
> NIC, you could directly call that, but its kind of a crap shoot.
> 
> Again, I think the answer is, if you want a crash dump, use local disk.  
> Dumping over the network is likely to be risky, or just non-functional, 
> in a large percentage of cases where you're crash dumping.  (Understand 
> also, a healthy bug free system should never crash.)

If we really want a network dump feature (diskless systems?), I think
we ought to take a page from the embedded system book: write a tiny
TFTP implementation.  There's not much to it (you just need UDP and IP
headers) and you can poll the driver in a loop.  It's simple and safe.

For what it's worth, the embedded systems I've worked on in the past
place both initial boot and dump logic into the system ROM, so that
there's no way it can be corrupted, and so that it's guaranteed to be
available -- unlike RAM.  If we're talking about this feature in order
to support embedded systems, I'd suggest trying something like that.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677
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