svn commit: r212964 - head/sys/kern

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
> The issues talked about so far all contribute to the reason for that.
> But one of the more basic gut reactions to it all is that the users
> want to be interested in helping with the debugging (even if just
> providing the requested info) for any sort of crash information
> to be useful.  And at the point we shift something from -current
> to -stable the percentage of people actively interested in participating
> in that sort of stuff flip.  The bulk of people using -current
> know it's risky and they do it out of some interest in debugging
> stuff.  The *bulk* of people using -stable are less interested or
> flat out not interested.  And have no clue what crash dumps are,
> may be challenged to notice partition-getting-full issues, etc.

I'm not sure I buy this argument, I'm afraid.  Part of the advantage of 
having all this done automatically on the as-shipped release media is that 
end users don't have to be interested in debugging - crashinfo(8) does 
most of the work for them.  There's no easy way to actually determine 
figures, but even if say only 10-15% of crashes can be diagnosed and 
corrected just from the output of crashinfo(8) then that's a huge win for 
the project as a whole. I'm guessing 10-15% is not unrealistic.

I appreciate the issue about filling partitions is a valid one.  Would a 
possible compromise be that on release media, crashinfo(8) or similar will 
default to only keeping the most recent coredump or similar?  Given /var 
now defaults to 4GB, Defaulting to keeping a single core is probably 
acceptable.

Gavin