Re:System76 ME Firmware Updates Plan
by srcmap on Friday December 01, 2017 @08:16AM
(#15823581)
FYI, there is a good technical reason in additional to the philosophical one.
I used to work on embedded systems where I have full control of uboot. With that, I can easily reserve the section of memory in boot uboot and Linux kernel when the keys logging info (such as FTRACE of ISR, sched switches etc) from kernel are kept.
When a kernel panic happens, the system will go thru the warmboot sequence and detected there are logging info in that section of DDR and dump it out before continue to boot.
This "postmortem debugging features" make debugging certain category of very difficult bugs (kernel driver panic) much easier.
With typical close source x86 bios in Linux laptop, it is very hard to enable this kind of debugging.
I used to work on embedded systems where I have full control of uboot. With that, I can easily reserve the section of memory in boot uboot and Linux kernel when the keys logging info (such as FTRACE of ISR, sched switches etc) from kernel are kept.
When a kernel panic happens, the system will go thru the warmboot sequence and detected there are logging info in that section of DDR and dump it out before continue to boot.
This "postmortem debugging features" make debugging certain category of very difficult bugs (kernel driver panic) much easier.
With typical close source x86 bios in Linux laptop, it is very hard to enable this kind of debugging.