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

[Alexander Puchmayr <alexander.puchmayr@linznet.at>]

Am Sonntag, 12. Oktober 2008 schrieb Alan McKinnon:
> 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

I really doubt that this works, the logger does not have the change to write 
anything as soon the kernel crashed, neither on a local disk or remote. It 
seems to be something you called the "instant kernel halt", and I have the 
luck to mess around with one of these rare cases :-(

But to give it a chance, I'm running a "cat /proc/kmsg" on the desktop, 
started via ssh as you suggested.

	Alex