svn commit: r212964 - head/sys/kern

[Ken Smith]

On Wed, 2010-09-22 at 22:24 +0100, Bruce Cran wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:02:30 +0300
> Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > But what was the reason that dumpdev="AUTO" was reverted?
> > I remember that POLA was quoted at the time.
> > I am not sure what the astonishment actually was - perhaps 'AUTO' was
> > not smart enough and destroyed somebody's data?
> > 
> 
> The problem with "AUTO" is that it takes time to do the dump unless
> using textdumps; it also has the potential of failing and leaving the
> system unusable until someone resets it. I believe the argument was
> that for production servers you want the system to be up and running
> again as soon as possible after a crash. 
> 

I'm (extremely!) sympathetic with people wanting to make it easier
to get debugging information in PRs and that sort of thing.  But
just so you know - unless I hear otherwise I'll be continuing to
try to remember to flip it off as the stable branches get created.

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 open to having my mind changed about this if there is enough
push-back.  Just saying I'm not there yet.

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |

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