Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel crash - howto find out what happened?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 12 October 2008 13:12:20 Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
> > If it's a kernel panic you actually get debugging information on the
> > console. It's just hidden "behind" the X server. Maybe you can reproduce
> > the problem working without X (If you can do your work purely from the
> > VTs)
>
> I've tried, but unfortunately, the X-Driver on my laptop (i965) does also
> seem to have stability problems, after ca an hour it froze using 100%
> cpu-time, unable to kill (nither kill or kill -9 did work). I guess it
> didn't wakeup from DPMS :-(

Here's a thought: if you have a spare machine, you could ssh in to your 
desktop and continue to work normally. The ssh session would be tailing an 
appropriate log, so even if the desktop goes south there's a good chance the  
error log is visible

For something more persistent, you could try temporarily sending all logs to a 
remote log server. Remote logging is quite efficient, I usually find the only 
thing that gets in it's way is a complete instant kernel halt that brings the 
whole machine down without warning - this is extremely rare on production 
kernels

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com