[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] kernel core dump and "dying breath"

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 12:14:49PM +0100, James Bottomley wrote:

> So the question becomes could we make the gathering of this data easier,
> so it just becomes a cut and paste from a log file (or even an automatic
> submission depending on what permissions you gave your distro).  The
> thought is that a lot of systems are coming with areas of NVRAM today,
> so we could write the dying gasp of a crashing kernel to this NVRAM area
> (avoids most of the problems that trying to write this to disk had and
> NVRAM isn't cleared on bios init) and then spit it out on next boot in a
> form that can be easily consumed by automated bug reporting tools or
> easily cut and pasted into an email.

pstore has this data and exposes it via a filesystem. It works out of 
the box for catching panics on EFI systems. BIOS is less capable, but in 
testing I've found that we can encode adequate data in a QR code 
assuming a reasonable resolution screen. I've some unfinished code for 
presenting this, having entirely lacked the time to do anything with it 
lately.

(Basic design was as follows: Take the backtrace, compress it, encode in 
an alphanumeric QR code including an http:// prefix, submit to 
http://kbu.gs/blah automatically when user takes a picture)

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org