Re: Linux 2.6.15-rc3

[Chris Shoemaker <c.shoemaker@cox.net>]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:38:48AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Michael Krufky wrote:
> > 
> > In other words, the OOPS is the last thing to show on the screen in text mode,
> > before the console switches into X, using debian sarge's default bootup
> > process.
> 
> Ok. Whatever it is, I'm happy it is doing that, since it caused us to see 
> the oops quickly. None of _my_ boxes do that, obviously (and I tested on 
> x86, x86-64 and ppc64 exactly to get reasonable coverage of what different 
> architectures might do - but none of the boxes are debian-based).
> 
> > I have no idea why gdb is running.... hmm... Anyhow, I'm away from that
> > machine right now, and it is powered off, so I can't look directly at the
> > startup scripts right now.  Would you like me to send more info later on when
> > I get home?  If so, what would you like to see?
> 
> It's not important, I was just curious about what strange things people 
> have in their bootup scripts.  If you can just grep through the rc.d files 
> to see what uses gdb, I'd just like to know...

I doubt gdb is in rc.d scripts.  My wild uninformed guess would be
that some process (maybe xinit?) hit a SEGV and had its own signal
handler installed that tried to call gdb and attach to the crashing
process.  I could imagine something like that being useful for
generating nice userspace stack traces to send to the developers.  I
think I've seen something similar in some builds.

-chris