Linux: The Case Against Crash Dumps
Submitted by srlinuxx on Fri, 05/25/2007 - 17:00.
In a recent lkml thread the concept of dumping an image of the kernel's memory to swap when the kernel hits a bug was discussed. Linus Torvalds pointed out that such a feature wasn't useful to an operating system like Linux that can ran on such a diverse assortment of computers, "yes, in a controlled environment, dumping the whole memory image to disk may be the right thing to do. BUT: in a controlled environment, you'll never get the kind of usage that Linux gets. Why do you think Linux (and Windows, for that matter) took away a lot of the market from traditional UNIX?" He went on to explain that there are systems where swap is not larger than the size of the core so collecting a crash dump would not be possible, that Linux instead tries to acknowledge bugs without crashing, and quite often the bug is actually in the drivers, "writing to disk when the biggest problem is a driver to begin with is INSANE."
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Linux Torvalds did not understand anticrash software ?
Windows since Win95 has its own anticrash module, although not as good as third party free Anticrash v5.0.
Linux needs anticrash to avoid bugs that crashes the operating system, and anticrash feature will allow user to continue on other tasks or work around the bug without rebooting.
Linus Torvalds' lack of understanding of microkernel is the reason for Linux to stay a monolithical operating system. CCUR(RedHawk and SleRT) and others added their own microkernels to Linux, to run Linux as a deterministic realtime operating system.
Linux community likes to use terminology(amateurish) that is different(not the same as in other professional operating system), so that it has not been able to lure newbies to Linux. Anticrash software do not have to crash dump the dram data to hdd. Instead, it recovers the previous terminal data and bypasses the buggy module, so that computer operation can continue without crash. Years ago, Unix flavors used to have 46 crashes(at Ford Motors) during the day's operation; rebooting was a tremendous waste of time, and time is money.
Linus trying to hide the excessive bugs in Linux, tells others they are stupid to write the bugs(modules) into the free hdd space for prosperity sake. He thinks all bugs are in drivers. On the contrary, bugs are anywhere, where there are memory address conflicts, sometimes not offset correctly to avoid other modules, or preotected to be used exclusively; not to mention monolithical logic conflicts in scripts.
So, ideal anticrash module can read the address conflicts either to offset it, or to redirect jump to another correct address in the script.