OPW Linux kernel intern develops QR code for Oops messages

http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/773488-opw-intern-develops-qr-code-for-linux-kernel-oops-messages

by lclark • 12 years ago

80 27 12 years ago

linux.com

jesuslop• 12 years ago

Good idea!

devnonymous• 12 years ago

Awesome ! Two points I'd like to make:

a. This idea, of using QR code to capture debug info, by itself is very interesting and innovative (AFAIK). Does there exist user space applications (desktop/web/mobile ...) that do similar things ? (ie: don't send us the logs, just click a pic and attach it to your support ticket ...). I personally haven't come across any, but of course my knowledge is limited. In any case, I think this sort of log capturing for debug purposes certainly should've be done more, IMHO.

b. Something like this could have never come out of proprietary software, simply because this is someone developer's specific itch that needed to be scratched. Whenever they say that open source software cannot compete with proprietary software, because proper 'product management' doesn't exist which guides feature development or that proprietary software will do the 'hard' things that aren't interesting/fun or just too much effort, I always argue against that. This sort of thing makes such arguments easier.

buerkle• 12 years ago

Rubbish in point b. I've scratched plenty of itches working on proprietary software that did not come from product management.

jordigh3• 12 years ago

Agreed, the open source ideology as explained by esr says a bunch of things that are demonstrably not true, suggesting that proprietary software is an inferior way to develop software or that proprietary software just will have more bugs because fewer people can read its source code (yo, heartbleed!)

Although the development model seems to more or less work for Linux because all of the corporate backing it has, despite being free, there are a lot of adages that esr started that sound like broken promises to me.

moron4hire• 12 years ago

I've worked on quite a few enterprise systems that took screen-caps on their own for error reports. As long as you test the hell out of the bootstrapping code that does all of that handling, it's a great way to take the user out of the loop.

cjbprime• 12 years ago

This is true, but it can't apply to the kernel. If your kernel has crashed, it is a terrible idea to try to write anything at all (such as a screenshot) to the disk -- because the kernel's safety guarantees disappear in such a situation, you're likely to make a bad situation worse and e.g. corrupt the filesystem.

danudey• 12 years ago

Does there exist user space applications (desktop/web/mobile ...) that do similar things ? (ie: don't send us the logs, just click a pic and attach it to your support ticket ...)

If you're going to go to the trouble of adding extra code to handle that behaviour, why not just add functionality to the app to report its own crashes, error log excerpts, etc.? This is likely the reason you haven't come across it: it makes less sense than just providing the option to submit the crash reports directly. Less work for the user, less support overhead for the developer, etc.

Something like this could have never come out of proprietary software, simply because this is someone developer's specific itch that needed to be scratched

I'll point out that most other OSes have a way of capturing crash reports, stack traces, memory dumps, etc. and sending them or storing them for debugging. Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers, which is why the QR code trick is necessary in the first place, and the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged.

andor• 12 years ago

Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers

Red Hat's abrt does that: https://github.com/abrt/abrt/

Using kdump, it can also report kernel panics. Kdump acts as a kernel that is executed after the main kernel panics. The fresh kernel has a clean state and can store the dump in a file system.

the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged

It's worse because it's not an automatic process. It's also better, because it doesn't require external dependencies like abrt and kdump -- it's part of the kernel.

ciupicri• 12 years ago

Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers

I think Ubuntu has something - https://errors.ubuntu.com/

tqh• 12 years ago

Welcome to the club :) https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmlr/2012-07-01_qr_encode_your...

dfc• 12 years ago

The write up leaves a lot to be desired. Using QR codes to display kernel oops messages was proposed and demonstrated back in June 2012.[^1] Matt Garret even mentions this in the lkml thread[^2] that the article links to, but for some reason the author did not bother to look into mjg's response. So I am not sure "welcome to the club" is accurate since the kernel has been a member (to the extent that this patch is evidence of membership) of the club since June 2012.

[^1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/503677/

[^2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/3/18/673

PeterWhittaker• 12 years ago

Wicked cool. I may steal, er, adopt this for our work!

westernmostcoy2• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool.

This title as posted on HN (not in the article) is silly, though. The Linux kernel does not have "interns", this person is an intern for GNOME's OPW (Outreach Program for Women):

https://gnome.org/opw/

lclark• 12 years ago

True! She was an OPW intern for the Linux kernel. See more on Kernel Newbies: http://kernelnewbies.org/OPWIntro

The latest round of kernel internships (through OPW :) just started.

westernmostcoy2• 12 years ago

This looks like a neat program :) I look forward to seeing more cool stuff come out of it!

zachlipton• 12 years ago

This could be one of the few remotely practical uses of QR codes in existence, easily capturing ephemeral data. Now, most kernel messages can get logged to a file, but there are cases in which that's not practical.

wereHamster2• 12 years ago

What happened to storing the oops in EFI variables? You can store much more data there than you can convey through QR codes displayed on the limited screen space.

jbb555• 12 years ago

Ugh another hateful mobile phone thing being introduced just because it's new and therefore better. What next? Removing the kernel and replacing it by web service calls to a mobile phone "app".

Keep this rubbish out of my kernel please.

OPW Linux kernel intern develops QR code for Oops messages

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