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Linux Developers Consider On-Screen QR Codes For Kernel Panics

Posted by timothy on from the take-a-picture-it'll-last-longer dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers are currently evaluating the possibility of using QR codes to display kernel oops/panic messages. Right now a lot of text is dumped to the screen when a kernel oops occurs, most of which isn't easily archivable by normal Linux end-users. With QR codes as Linux oops messages, a smart-phone could capture the display and either report the error string or redirect them to an error page on Kernel.org. The idea of using QR codes within the Linux kernel is still being discussed by upstream developers."

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Good idea by Primate+Pete · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not sure how hard it would be to pull this off in practice, but kudos to the team for improving (or at least thinking about) better usability from the kernel out.

    1. Re:Good idea by Levex · · Score: 5, Informative

      We are encoding the full Oops, i.e. from the "cut here" to the "end trace" marker. Classic won't ever go away, and we had already created a configuration option called CONFIG_QR_OOPS that can disable this at all. In case your distro or you had compiled it in and you don't want to have QR codes on your screen, I just added a new kernel parameter currently called 'qr_oops', which can as well disable it.

      --
      Cheers Levente Kurusa
  2. Re:Huh? by ledow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You lose nothing.

    Anything that could have been logged to disk will have been.

    Anything that couldn't is probably FAR TOO LONG to even start taking down any other way and almost certainly will cut through the screen buffer limit anyway (every kernel panic I've had - which is about a dozen I think - was like that).

    Let's compare and contrast to, say, Windows. Bluescreen with minidump and error code that has 7 million potential causes.

    At least with a QR code, for those totally undumpable errors, you stand half a chance of snapping it and providing several kiloybytes of useful information for someone to work from - that they know hasn't been transcribed wrongly. And can be taken from even a completely hung machine.

    It's a good idea. Someone needs to make a patch for it. The biggest problem - as always - will be making sure you can get to the point that you can write to the video memory and do so with enough processing / storage to be able to write something useful into the QR code.

  3. Re:Wish other OSs did this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And with QR codes, the conversation becomes this:

    "My computer froze."
    "What happened?"
    "It put some white and black crap on the screen."
    "What did it say?"
    "How the fuck should I know? It was random white and black dots! Like a fucking Rorschach test!"
    "It probably was a kernel panic. What was the error?"
    "I dunno, because like I said, ALL IT HAD WAS SOME DOTS AND SHIT. Then it rebooted! So it's gone! FUCK!"

    How is that an improvement? Yes it's a change, but it's not an improvement.