From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <40F53D8A.4080005@anvil.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 15:04:58 +0100
From: Dave Lukes <davel@anvil.com>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] port/devcons.c is not port-able
References: <8475f74f8d5360fd4262360f61aae5fa@juice.thebigchoice.com>
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Problem is, when there's a "panic: smashed stack" type condition,
after that, the only complexity that matters is the complexity of the
code path leading to the characters becoming humanly visible.

I tend to agree with (?jmk?) that serial lines and terminal servers are
the way to go for the moment:
the serial line gets the bits easily out of the danger zone (the dying
machine),
and you can then log them at leisure.

As to the future, I'm sure that we'll all have USB consoles in a few
years.  Oh, joy.

<thought>
Is there any space in nvram where one could dump the last N bytes of
console output?
At least that way you'd be able to see it eventually ...

Of course, what would be cool would be a "panic display": an lcd with
some nvram that keeps the last message in it.
</thought>

DaveL.

matt@proweb.co.uk wrote:

>Hi Ron,
>
>I thought it sounded like a good idea it's just not something I feel qualified to comment on
>
>being able to set consoles in plani.ini to console=+/tcp/host/875
>sounds like it adds flexibility while, if your coding assumptions are correct, it reduces complexity elsewhere
>
>m
>
>