Measure first, fix later [LWN.net]

Measure first, fix later

Posted May 15, 2006 14:00 UTC (Mon) by walles (guest, #954)
Parent article: Kernel bugs: out of control?

As said in the article, since there's no good measurement of how buggy the kernel is (or what BUG() macros that trigger) the kernel's bugginess can't be neither quantified nor measurably improved.

Currently, when I've seen Linux systems panic, they have printed a bunch of information to screen and then given me the option to re-boot.

What *should* happen IMO, to make these things measurable, is to store that information somewhere it can survive the re-boot. At a convenient point in time, the up-and-running re-booted system should ask the admin if (s)he wants the bug to be registered in some central repository.

This way we'd have *a lot* more statistics on what usually goes wrong inside the kernel. And what parts need fixing the most.

That said, for me, Linux kernels usually work very well. But just because I don't have any problems doesn't mean nobody has them...

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Measure first, fix later

Posted May 15, 2006 21:18 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link]

This would be a very good use for those (almost) redundant floppy drives. After a kernel panic, you shouldn't touch the HDD in case you make it worse. But writing to an FDD would be a great solution.

*Warning* you'd have to make this activated manually, because it would trash anything that was already on a floppy belonging to an unsuspecting user.