17-19 October 2023
Palexco
Europe/Madrid timezone

To crash or not to crash: if you do, at least recover fast!

19 Oct 2023, 16:00
5m
Palexco

Palexco

Muelle de Trasatlánticos, s/n, 15003 A Coruña, A Coruña, Spain
Lightning Talk Lightning Talks II

Speaker

Guilherme G. Piccoli (Igalia)

Description

What could be possibly worse that an almost unbeatable boss in a game or a tough maze that consume hours of gameplay with not much progress? How about a Linux kernel crash that makes you lose all the game progress with no apparent reason or feedback?

Though rare, it is a real possibility that would make gamers quite annoyed, given that Linux is used more and more as a platform for playing games.
Some technologies are available to collect logs and feedback the user in case such disastrous events happen, mostly related with kernel crashes handling mechanisms. The main ones available are kdump and pstore, but still there are work to be done in this area...

In this talk we're going to present the basics about kernel crash handling, like how a kernel panic might happen, how to deal with that (with an overall discussion about kdump and pstore techs) and the kdumpst tool, developed specially to deal with this situation on Steam Deck (and generically on Arch Linux); also we're gonna discuss some missing pieces / ideas to make it even less likely gamers need to complain that their device just got hang for no reason!

Code of Conduct Yes
GSoC, EVoC or Outreachy No
In-person or virtual presentation In-person

Primary author

Presentation Materials

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