Kerneloops builds error reporting bridges for Linux users and developers

Article title: Kerneloops bridges error reports between Linux users and developers. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

When the Linux system crashes, what people see is not the classic "blue screen" phenomenon of Microsoft Windows operating system. Instead, they display the system crash report signature (known as "oops ", this is a surprising exclamation point, which is equivalent to "Oh") to help developers identify the cause of system errors. Some people may think this is silly, but the features of this Linux system play an irreplaceable role.

Tracking these "oops" is a responsibility of the Kerneloops organization. According to the signatures of these submitted system crash reports, this organization has successfully fixed many Linux system bugs, thus greatly improving the quality of the Linux system core (kernel. These efforts to track "oops" and fix system bugs have become an important factor for Linux to attract the favor of many enterprise users and other users.

Arjan van de Ven, an engineer at Intel's open-source technology center kernel, told InternetNews.com that "the so-called 'opps 'in Linux is equivalent to the 'blue screen' in Microsoft Windows ', these two concepts are actually the same in terms of cause and working principle. In Linux, the system crash report signature is displayed instead of being painted with blue and error code on the screen ."

In fact, Kerneloops is operated by Van de Ven alone, although most of the "oops" collection detection and reporting methods are automatically submitted, however, Kerneloops provides a client program dedicated to submitting "oops" records for Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Debian users. With the increasing market share of Linux, this open-source system is gradually moving towards non-technical commercial users and general users. in this way, the "oops" record submission function becomes more and more important, large Linux vendors such as red hats have set the "oops" record client submission function to the default option of their Fedora Linux system.

Van de Ven explained, "many users do not know how to discover these system problems and where to send bugs. Users who have installed the "oops" record to submit the client only need to click the mouse. I believe most users prefer this simple submission method ."

"The Kerneloops package can automatically pass the Linux kernel crash information to a repository, the core maintenance personnel of the Linux system can call the information of this repository for targeted system diagnosis and repair system bugs."

"ORA is added because we actively track system kernel crashes," Frields said. The Kerneloops feature will provide great support for our cooperation with upstream software providers such as the kernel developer community. The promotion of Fedora not only meets the interests of the community, but also helps us to modify system bugs based on the "oops" record to improve the quality of kernel code.

In addition, Kerneloops can also use the Linux Kernel email List (Linux Kernel Mailing List is a "concentration camp" for important technical issues such as Linux Kernel bugs and related designs, hereinafter referred to as LKML) to collect "oops" records. In addition, Kerneloops periodically sends messages about typical critical kernel bugs to LKML. Van de Ven pointed out that if there is enough user feedback to reflect a kernel bug, then kernel developers will track the system bug accordingly and make every effort to correct it.

Van de Ven said, "kernel developers generally focus on Kerneloops. after all, the more kernel bugs I (Kerneloops) provide, the more information they have. If only one report is submitted for a system problem, this may be a case. However, if 500 reports are submitted for the same system problem, this problem is a real system bug that these kernel developers need to solve."

Therefore, Van de Ven believes that these reports have greatly contributed to bug fixes by Linux developers, which has played a positive role in improving the quality of the entire system kernel. Considering that the number of submitted reports received by Kerneloops organizations varies with kernel systems of different versions, it is difficult to measure the specific number of submitted reports.
　　
Van de Ven said, "What we are currently working to solve is to make many users suffer from system bugs. If you look at the number of different bugs, you may be confused. 2.6.25 has more than 1300 bugs in the kernel, but half of these bugs only happen once. We have fixed a lot of bugs, and these bugs we have fixed are the tough ones that really need to be addressed. For the Linux kernel of 2.6.27RC (Candidate Version), Van de Ven has seen some early problems, the most significant problem is the removal of related drivers when using USB devices, which ranks the top five among the top 20 "oops. "For now, this is one of the most popular system kernel bugs," Van de Ven said ."

Efforts to improve the quality of the entire Linux kernel are gradually becoming the focus of the industry. To improve the quality of the driver code, the Linux Foundation has recently been committed to simplifying kernel tasks. However, not all people are discussing the best solution to avoid bug code, or do their best to avoid such errors during system kernel development to ensure code quality, or you have to make up for the trouble.

Greg Kroah-Harman, an open platform researcher at Novell, told InternetNews.com that "Kerneloops has done a very good job in assisting Upstream Kernel developers in tracking system problems and fixing problems. The information submitted by non-users to the kernel organization is of great help to identify problems in the kernel development stage ". At the same time, Van de Ven said he wanted to see more people involved in fixing bugs.