Decoding Oops Jan 10, 2008, 07 :00 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (4007 reads)
"'This week, a total of 49 oopses and warnings have been reported, compared to 53 reports in the previous week,' Arjan van de Ven noted, sending out a list of the week's top 10 kernel oopses. Al Viro suggested, 'FWIW, people moaning about the lack of entry-level kernel work would do well by decoding those to the level of 'this place in this function, called from <here>, with so-and-so variable being <this>' and posting the results." This was met by multiple requests for documentation on how to actually decode an oops. Linus Torvalds explained:
"'It's actually not necessarily at all that trivial, unless you have a deep understanding of the code generated for the architecture in question (and even then, some oopses take more time to figure out than others, thanks to inlining and tailcalls etc). If the oops happened with a kernel you generated yourself, it's usually rather easy. Especially if you said 'y' to the 'generate debugging info' question at configuration time...'"
