svn commit: r212964 - head/sys/kern

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <alpine.LNX.2.00.1009231841500.23791 at ury.york.ac.uk>
            Gavin Atkinson <gavin at FreeBSD.org> writes:
: 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.

Furthermore, if we aren't interested in crash dumps by default, why do
we install the huge .symbols files?

Warner