Comment by warent
8 years ago
Marcan's attitude is great; I know of a ton of people (myself included) who would've written that article with far more complaining interleaved. Super informative as well, I learned a ton from this article (GRUB 2 feature for marking off bad RAM? Wow!). Very well written, informative, humorous, etc. Love it
Agreed. Marcan's a chill dude. I saw him a few times in the Dolphin Emulator IRC and he always had interesting things to say.
From my perspective this approach was pretty unique; going all the way down to debugging the hardware first may seem obvious to some, but it's a totally opposite approach to how I'd go about it. My mind would jump directly to producing a minimal test case. Would've never thought to mark off bad RAM with an obscure(ish?) GRUB 2 feature. Would've never thought to selectively flip a kernel flag for some parts of the code.
It's great to get these perspectives from people who really know how to dig down and debug deep.
From a slightly more old-school sysadmin approach, I learned to troubleshoot roughly in line with the OSI model (https://www.lifewire.com/layers-of-the-osi-model-illustrated...), starting at layer 1 (physical) and working up.
That's not to say I spend a whole lot of time looking at the lower levels, but my quick mental checklist starts off down at physical points, and I try to quickly eliminate possibilities. In a lot of cases it's obvious it's a code / logic bug, and you can completely skip the lower layer stuff, but making it a conscious step pays off.