On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:09 PM, Marion Hakanson <hakan...@ohsu.edu> wrote: > rea...@newsguy.com said: >> Why is the console interface left so primitive?. >> Seems it would at least have a usable mouse so one could have some chance >> of copy paste when there are what appear to be important messages written to >> console. > > Hi Harry, > > As someone else mentioned, most of this stuff will end up in the > /var/adm/messages file. Except, of course, for the very interesting > lowest-level boot problems.
In which case you can edit the kernel line in grub to add a -k option to the boot options. If the system panics, you will be dropped to a kmdb prompt. You can manually enter kmdb with F1-A or shift-break from a text console. You can use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to shift to the text console if you aren't there already. Once at the kmdb prompt, you can use ::msgbuf to see the things that have scrolled off the screen. You should get the output a page at a time. If you need to provide this information to mailing lists, take a somewhat low resolution picture of it (e.g. a 1 megapixel picture from your mobile phone is most likely quite adequate). kmdb allows you to do many other interesting things, such as looking at running processes (::ptree, ::ps, ...) looking as to why a particular process is hung (::pgrep hungprocess | ::walk thread | ::findstack -v). If you are inclined to dig into this further, I would suggest perusing the mdb manual. Pretty much everything that works with "mdb -k" works with kmdb. The key exception that I've noticed is the lack of the ! operator to pipe dcmd output to a shell command. Considering that the OS is stopped while you are at a kmdb prompt, it's not surprising that ! doesn't work. The serial console advice below is also quite helpful if you have suitable hardware. Unfortunately, many systems these days lack a serial port. I doubt (without testing - I may be quite wrong) that a serial port hanging off of a USB port will be a very poor/fragile console. > What you need to solve such "scrolling off the screen" problems is > something even lower tech: a serial (RS232, COM-port) console. > Not all desktop PC BIOS'es can redirect their BIOS text to a COM > port, but Solaris & Linux can be told to do so for their system > console input & output. And grub itself can be told to do this > as well. > > Then you hook up your troublesome machine's serial (COM) port to > a working machine's serial port, fire up a terminal emulator (Windows > hyperterm will work; On Linux/Unix I would use "conserver", but "tip" > will do in a pinch), and watch the console messages that way. > > Of course, getting the serial ports wired correctly is a bit of an > art (you may need a "null modem" cable, for example); And there are > some boot-time flags you enter via grub to tell whatever kernel you're > booting to temporarily use a "tty" console. Telling Google something > like "solaris boot serial console" turns up quite a few references. > > Regards, > > Marion > > > _______________________________________________ > opensolaris-discuss mailing list > opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org > -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
