www/chromium crashing whole system

[Marcin Wisnicki]

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 14:17:35 -0800, Julian Elischer wrote:

> On 11/13/10 2:08 PM, Robert Watson wrote:
>>
>> If regular crashdumps appear unreliable, try setting up a textdump with
>> an automatic reboot, that might provde more reliable (small chance, but
>> it could).
> 
> we did have some people working on an ethernet version of the
> dcons/remote debugging stuff
> I guess it only supports a small subset of ethernet chips though..
> Anyone know the status of that work?
> 

I don't know about ethernet dump but how about simply dumping memory after 
reset ?

See:
 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack
 - http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/
 - http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/tools/msramdmp/

Last link contains a tool to dump memory to usb disk after reset. If kgdb 
works with raw memory dumps, it may already work.

This has the potential to solve all tricky debugging cases without needing 
firewire.

A boot time kernel option to avoid certain memory areas which are 
overwritten during boot by bios and ram dumping tool could be useful or 
maybe necessary.

It can even be completely automated, eg. if kernel would maintain some 
kind of "RAM dirty" flag, then during boot something (loader or kernel) 
would check for it and perform dump if needed.

Another idea worth implementing or at least adding to project ideas list 
is to implement everything that is currently possible with serial (boot0, 
loader, kernel console, ddb) over EHCI debug port:
 - http://www.coreboot.org/EHCI_Debug_Port