On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 03:04:11PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote: > > I am bigger fan of textdumps than minidumps, because in my opinion > > textdumps provide quite a lot of useful info. I'm working with FreeBSD > > kernel for years now and almost entirely avoided gdb for kernel > > debugging. DDB and printf(9) are in 99% enough for me (maybe I'm too > > traditional, but that's the fact). I'm not saying that textdumps are > > enough in 99%, though. > > Have you looked at a /var/crash/core.txt.X file yet? If not, you should, as > it is very similar to a text dump. In fact, it will contain the contents of > any ddb trace buffer in addition to a stack trace from kgdb, process listing > from ps, etc. [...] > > Another important thing in my opinion is privacy of user's data. Once > > the data hit the disk it can stay there forever. This is why I use > > encrypted swap everywhere. I'd never send kernel minidump from my > > laptop or from any of my servers to anyone, but I'd be happy to send > > textdump. > > > > I find textdumps a great solution that's in the middle between > > protecting user's privacy and providing a lot of useful info and I'd > > much prefer to turn on textdumps by default and eventually extend what > > we dump, than to make minidumps the default. > > I'm suggesting they provide us the core.txt.X file, not the full minidump. > A developer could then ask them to run specific commands from a subsequent > kgdb session to obtain more details.
But you still will have your kernel memory dumped to disk. This is probably not a problem for most of the users, though. > > You can always ask user to add this one-line to rc.conf to turn > > minidump on and provide you the info that was missing in textdump. > > This only works for easily reproducible bugs, and in that case they can turn > on dumps later without a need for it to be automatic at all. And I'm arguing that those are very rare situations where there is a bug, which is hard to reproduce and where textdump won't be of any help. I'm aware that those are not strong arguments, but just worth taking into account, IMHO. -- Pawel Jakub Dawidek http://www.wheelsystems.com p...@freebsd.org http://www.FreeBSD.org FreeBSD committer Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
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