Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > We have a kernel log device to retrieve them. It's just that if everything > is going down, you probably want to see the last words of the kernel at the > console, because that's your only chance.
Well, if the kernel doesn't know gfx hardware (which it shouldn't, imo), it simply can't access the "raw" console. It can print out messages on some serial port (if you have one) or other *simple* communicatiosn hardware, or write message to some file or circular buffer on disk. Or use morse code to the PC speaker ;-) But the screen bitmap is off-limits. But I think that limitation is something that it should be possible to live with. There have been other OS:s where neither the kernel nor the gfx hardware knows of any text-mode console (e.g. amigaos and probably also macs), and I've not experienced or heard about any problems with that. I was usually annoyed when I used SunOS or Solaris, where the kernel *was* able to put random messages directly on the screen corrupting my X windows. For serious debugging of kernel panics, you'd want to use a gdb on the serial line, or a real crash dump for post-mortem debugging (I'm not very familiar with crash dump feature, but I think it means writing the system state onto the swap partition, or some other partition reserved for this very purpose). Regards, /Niels _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
