Re: www/chromium crashing whole system

On Tue Nov 16 10, Marcin Wisnicki wrote:
> 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.

WOW! this is the first time i hear of such a concept. it seems great for
people like me who are desktop users without any serial/firewire consoles or
any additional debugging hardware.

is there a way of trying this out somehow? personally i wouldn't need the
memory dump to work in partitions. i'd simply blug in a blank usb stick and
have the memory dump dd'ed onto it. i think adding partition awareness is not
really needed.

cheers.
alex

> 
> 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
> 

-- 
a13x