Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/2] printk: Shared kernel logging

[Sean Hudson]

On 9/29/2016 8:36 PM, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 5:55 PM, Sean Hudson <sean_hudson@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> This patch set is based on Linus' v4.8-rc8 tag.
>> 
>> This debug feature allows the kernel to use an external buffer and
>> control block for kernel log messages. The feature is controlled by
>> an optional command line parameter. The existing buffer and control
>> block can contain existing log messages from previous boot cycles
>> and/or the bootloader. The command line parameter was chosen for
>> flexibility, cross arch portability, and the ability to dynamically
>> enable/disable this feature. The parameter specifies the address of
>> a control block used to replace the default log buffer. Existing
>> bootloader and kernel log messages are kept, in order, inside the
>> new buffer. After a boot that preserves the buffer contents, a 
>> bootloader can display both kernel and bootloader log entries from
>> multiple, previous boots. It also allows the kernel to display
>> bootloader log entries along with its own messages.
>> 
>> This feature is intended for debug purposes and has no effect
>> unless the command line parameter is specified. Further, it
>> validates the passed control block carefully and if any checks
>> fail, it falls back to the default behaviour. As such, it can be
>> left enabled by default.
>> 
>> Memory Reservation
>> 
>> This feature expects the bootloader to reserve/preserve the shared
>> buffer memory. This reservation needs to prevent the kernel from
>> overwriting the external log control block and log entries. In my
>> testing, I've used the 'fdt' commands in uboot to dynamically
>> inject reserved memory regions via the DT to the kernel.
> 
> Interesting! I wonder if this can be adjusted to incorporate the 
> existing console logging feature in the pstore which does a similar 
> thing? Though pstore doesn't know about bootloader logs, really,
> it's just storing kernel logs in a ring buffer. Maybe this can
> provide a backend to pstore or something, especially since pstore
> initialization happens "too late" for this to really be very
> sensible. It just seems like it'd be nice to have a single persistent
> console memory region...
> 

I don't know that much about pstore.  From your description though, it
sounds feasible to put the two together at some point.  How arch
specific is pstore?

-- 
Sean

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