Re: failsafe booting..

[OKUJI Yoshinori]

From: Andrew <address@hidden>
Subject: failsafe booting..
Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2000 11:07:01 +0930

> At boot time the bootloader would change the default kernel to the
> failsafe one and boot the new kernel. Thus if the new kernel hangs, the
> machine will after a certain amount of time reboot ( with the help of a
> watchdog card designed for this purppose).

  I don't think this is always possible. That depends on how the
kernel hangs. If your kernel panics "successfully", that would be
possible. But if you kernel hangs up in an unintended manner, it is
quite difficult or impossible to reboot the machine, because, for
example, the kernel might disable every interrupt lines. As you may
know, this very often happens when you develop a kernel.

> So basically I wanted to know if something like this has been done
> before in grub or other bootloaders, if not is it possible/feasible ? Or
> is it a completely stupid way of doing things ? Are there other ways to
> achieve what I want ?

  I don't think it is feasible. As Linus Torvalds says, kernel
development shouldn't be so easy.

Okuji