On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 2:23 AM, Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi! > >> > I don't think that he wants to unify all the printk's in the system. I don't >> > think that reporting all errors "in the same way as an ATA error" makes any >> > sense. That would just lead to very stupid and unnatural messages for all >> > errors that are not like "ATA errors". Annotation of existing errors is a much >> > more flexible and feasible solution to that problem. >> >> Please don't misinterpret. I don't want to make other errors parse >> like an ATA error, I want to make the plumbing be parallel. I want >> one umbrella mechanism for reporting things that are more important >> than just-another-printk(). >> >> Because frankly, "parse dmesg" is a pretty crappy way to have to >> monitor your system for failures, and I am tired of explaining to >> people why we still do that. > > "parse dmesg" does not work for monitoring your system for failures; > dmesg buffer can overflow. > > If something fails, you should get errno returned for userspace, and > that's where you should be doing the monitoring. > > So... what parts don't return enough information to userspace so that > you need to parse dmesg? Lets fix them. If I get a DMA timeout on my disk, I want to know about it. If I get an OOM kill, I want to know about it. Etc. I *don't* want every application to participate in system monitoring, and that's what it seems you're suggesting. I want a monitoring daemon which is notified of important system events. We like to report these things in various ways, including squirting them out onto the network. I *don't* want to run regexes against dmesg or /var/log/messages or /var/log/kernel every N seconds, that's just a gross hack. I really want first-class notifications of significant events. I don't mind having to do parsing of events - as I said before, they can even be loosely structured strings. They just need to be more important than a plain old printk(), and preferably come through a different channel. I understand that many users will not want this level of monitoring, and that's why it should be flexible enough to devolve into printk(). But we have thousands of systems. I need a better view of what is happening. Tim -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-s390" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
