Re: CVS commit: src/sys/kern

[Darren Reed <darrenr%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 12:19:42PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:52:45AM +0000, Darren Reed wrote:
> > > ddb.commandonenter is not enough?
> > 
> > That doesn't exist.
> 
> >From -current ddb(4):
>      To specify commands which will be executed on each entry to ddb:
>      options DDB_COMMANDONENTER="trace;show registers"
>      In this case, "trace" and then "show registers" will be executed automat-
>      ically.
> 
> So just use options DDB_COMMANDONENTER="trace" in your kernel config
> file and you get the same functionality. Or ddb.commandonenter=trace
> in /etc/sysctl.conf

This needs to be documented in options(4) and panic(9) so that people
can learn about it.

For me, I'm not comfortable it will be of value as it presupposes that
the ddb parser is working and that the kernel will survive until that
time.

I'm quite dismayed that it is so hard to get information about a panic
out of NetBSD.  Writing a crash dump doesn't appear to work (where the
dump space is the same as swap) and nearly every time there is a panic,
the system faults again in ddb, either locking ddb and the system up
or just preventing you from getting what you need.

Darren