Planned availability of SGI kdb and lkcd in future 2.4 vendor dis tributions

[Keith Owens]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2000 05:26:23 +0300, 
Marc Esipovich <marc at corky.net> wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 09:49:52AM +1100, Keith Owens wrote:
> Scott Lurndal <slurn at nanobiz.com> wrote:
> >Being that there is no additional overhead (aside from some small number
> >of kb of code) when KDB is included in a production kernel, it is nice
> >to have on all the time - just in case the system does panic or hang
> >due to a heisenbug.
> >
>> It does introduce overhead on some common paths.
>> [snip]
>
>I don't think all of these are really relevent, because kdb should be under
>the 'kernel hacking' section and kdb will only be used by ones who need it.

My text was in response to Scott Lurndal's note "it is nice to have on
all the time".  In that context, the overhead matters.

It would be nice if a supplier could say

  Go back one hour and turn the debugger on

but until somebody invents a time machine, the only thing they can do
is supply a kernel with the debugger always turned on.