ddb_enable="YES" by default?

[Larry Rosenman]

On 2014-09-05 16:35, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Friday, September 05, 2014 5:08:07 pm Peter Wemm wrote:
>> On Friday 05 September 2014 13:51:24 Craig Rodrigues wrote:
>> > On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 7:54 AM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > > Probably at least 50% of the time when I work with a user on a bug report,
>> > > I ask them to go into kgdb and run specific commands to extract more
>> > > detailed info (print some struct, etc.).
>> >
>> > Sure, I understand, but you are not working with every user who
>> > encounters a kernel panic in FreeBSD.  For the average or casual
>> > FreeBSD user, such as desktop
>> > users of FreeBSD or PC-BSD, wouldn't it be better
>> > to have ddb_enable="YES" be the default in FreeBSD?  The ddb script
>> > there does a fairly reasonable
>> > job of gathering some useful info which can be analyzed later, and
>> > then rebooting the box.
>> >
>> > For more expert users, or people developing products, they can set
>> > ddb_enable="NO"
>> > and do more advanced debugging.  Or hook into /etc/rc.d/ddb and define
>> > a different
>> > ddb script which doesn't do textdumps on kernel panic.
>> 
>> I think what John was saying was at that point it's too late.  The 
>> loss of the
>> crash dump means the one shot at getting more information is gone.
>> 
>> For reproducable crashes, yes, an end user could just flip the bit.  
>> But for a
>> one-off, it's too late.
> 
> Also, crashinfo is already enabled by default.  If a user enables crash 
> dumps
> in the installer, they will have a nice /var/crash/core.txt.N that they 
> can
> post to the mailing lists just as easily as the text dump you envision. 
>  And in
> fact, I've seen our users already doing this.  (Have you looked at a
> /var/crash/core.txt.N file yet?)
I've in fact done just that (posted the top part of a core.txt.N file, 
and gotten VERY good results
from the list(s).....

-- 
Larry Rosenman                     http://www.lerctr.org/~ler
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