I'm seeing a bunch of debug prints from a user of print_hex_dump_bytes()
in my kernel logs, but I don't have CONFIG_DYNAMIC_DEBUG enabled nor do I
have DEBUG defined in my build. The problem is that
print_hex_dump_bytes() calls a wrapper function in lib/hexdump.c that
calls print_hex_dump() with KERN_DEBUG level. There are three cases to
consider here
1. CONFIG_DYNAMIC_DEBUG=y --> call dynamic_hex_dum()
2. CONFIG_DYNAMIC_DEBUG=n && DEBUG --> call print_hex_dump()
3. CONFIG_DYNAMIC_DEBUG=n && !DEBUG --> stub it out
Right now, that last case isn't detected and we still call
print_hex_dump() from the stub wrapper.
Let's make print_hex_dump_bytes() only call print_hex_dump_debug() so that
it works properly in all cases.
Case #1, print_hex_dump_debug() calls dynamic_hex_dump() and we get same
behavior. Case #2, print_hex_dump_debug() calls print_hex_dump() with
KERN_DEBUG and we get the same behavior. Case #3, print_hex_dump_debug()
is a nop, changing behavior to what we want, i.e. print nothing.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190816235624.115280-1-swboyd@chromium.org
Signed-off-by: Stephen Boyd <swboyd@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
When kernel panic happens, it will first print the panic call stack,
then the ending msg like:
[ 35.743249] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception
[ 35.749975] ------------[ cut here ]------------
The above message are very useful for debugging.
But if system is configured to not reboot on panic, say the
"panic_timeout" parameter equals 0, it will likely print out many noisy
message like WARN() call stack for each and every CPU except the panic
one, messages like below:
WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 280 at kernel/sched/core.c:1198 set_task_cpu+0x183/0x190
Call Trace:
<IRQ>
try_to_wake_up
default_wake_function
autoremove_wake_function
__wake_up_common
__wake_up_common_lock
__wake_up
wake_up_klogd_work_func
irq_work_run_list
irq_work_tick
update_process_times
tick_sched_timer
__hrtimer_run_queues
hrtimer_interrupt
smp_apic_timer_interrupt
apic_timer_interrupt
For people working in console mode, the screen will first show the panic
call stack, but immediately overridden by these noisy extra messages,
which makes debugging much more difficult, as the original context gets
lost on screen.
Also these noisy messages will confuse some users, as I have seen many bug
reporters posted the noisy message into bugzilla, instead of the real
panic call stack and context.
Adding a flag "suppress_printk" which gets set in panic() to avoid those
noisy messages, without changing current kernel behavior that both panic
blinking and sysrq magic key can work as is, suggested by Petr Mladek.
To verify this, make sure kernel is not configured to reboot on panic and
in console
# echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger
to see if console only prints out the panic call stack.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1551430186-24169-1-git-send-email-feng.tang@intel.com
Signed-off-by: Feng Tang <feng.tang@intel.com>
Suggested-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Acked-by: Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Acked-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.com>
Cc: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
In commit b1fca27d38 ("kernel debug: support resetting WARN*_ONCE")
we got the opportunity to reset state on the one shot messages,
without having to reboot.
However printk_once (printk_deferred_once) live in a different file
and didn't get the same kind of update/conversion, so they remain
unconditionally one shot, until the system is rebooted.
For example, we currently have:
sched/rt.c: printk_deferred_once("sched: RT throttling activated\n");
..which could reasonably be tripped as someone is testing and tuning
a new system/workload and their task placements. For consistency, and
to avoid reboots in the same vein as the original commit, we make these
two instances of _once the same as the WARN*_ONCE instances are.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1555121491-31213-1-git-send-email-paul.gortmaker@windriver.com
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Pull printk updates from Petr Mladek:
- Allow to sort mixed lines by an extra information about the caller
- Remove no longer used LOG_PREFIX.
- Some clean up and documentation update.
* tag 'printk-for-5.1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/pmladek/printk:
printk/docs: Add extra integer types to printk-formats
printk: Remove no longer used LOG_PREFIX.
lib/vsprintf: Remove %pCr remnant in comment
printk: Pass caller information to log_store().
printk: Add caller information to printk() output.
The commit 719f6a7040 ("printk: Use the main logbuf in NMI
when logbuf_lock is available") brought back the possible deadlocks
in printk() and NMI.
The check of logbuf_lock is done only in printk_nmi_enter() to prevent
mixed output. But another CPU might take the lock later, enter NMI, and:
+ Both NMIs might be serialized by yet another lock, for example,
the one in nmi_cpu_backtrace().
+ The other CPU might get stopped in NMI, see smp_send_stop()
in panic().
The only safe solution is to use trylock when storing the message
into the main log-buffer. It might cause reordering when some lines
go to the main lock buffer directly and others are delayed via
the per-CPU buffer. It means that it is not useful in general.
This patch replaces the problematic NMI deferred context with NMI
direct context. It can be used to mark a code that might produce
many messages in NMI and the risk of losing them is more critical
than problems with eventual reordering.
The context is then used when dumping trace buffers on oops. It was
the primary motivation for the original fix. Also the reordering is
even smaller issue there because some traces have their own time stamps.
Finally, nmi_cpu_backtrace() need not longer be serialized because
it will always us the per-CPU buffers again.
Fixes: 719f6a7040 ("printk: Use the main logbuf in NMI when logbuf_lock is available")
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180627142028.11259-1-pmladek@suse.com
To: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@I-love.SAKURA.ne.jp>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Acked-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
The goal of passing the "quiet" option to the kernel is for the kernel
to be quiet unless something really is wrong.
Sofar passing quiet has been (mostly) equivalent to passing
loglevel=4 on the kernel commandline. Which means to show any messages
with a level of KERN_ERR or higher severity on the console.
In practice this often does not result in a quiet boot though, since
there are many false-positive or otherwise harmless error messages printed,
defeating the purpose of the quiet option. Esp. the ACPICA code is really
bad wrt this, but there are plenty of others too.
This commit makes CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_QUIET configurable.
This for example will allow distros which want quiet to really mean quiet
to set CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_QUIET so that only messages with a higher severity
then KERN_ERR (CRIT, ALERT, EMERG) get printed, avoiding an endless game
of whack-a-mole silencing harmless error messages.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180619115726.3098-1-hdegoede@redhat.com
To: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
To: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Pull printk updates from Petr Mladek:
- print the warning about dropped messages on consoles on a separate
line. It makes it more legible.
- one typo fix and small code clean up.
* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/pmladek/printk:
added new line symbol after warning about dropped messages
printk: fix typo in printk_safe.c
printk: simplify no_printk()
Building kallsyms fails without CONFIG_PRINTK due to a missing
declaration:
kernel/kallsyms.c: In function 'kallsyms_show_value':
kernel/kallsyms.c:670:10: error: 'kptr_restrict' undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean 'keyring_restrict'?
This moves the declaration outside of the #ifdef guard, the definition
is already available without CONFIG_PRINTK.
Fixes: c0f3ea1589 ("stop using '%pK' for /proc/kallsyms pointer values")
Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
[ I clearly need to start doing "allnoconfig" builds too, or just have a
test branch for the 0day robot - Linus ]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which
makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license.
By default all files without license information are under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2.
Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0'
SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.
This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne.
How this work was done:
Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of
the use cases:
- file had no licensing information it it.
- file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it,
- file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information,
Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases
where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license
had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords.
The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to
a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the
output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX
tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne. Philippe prepared the
base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files.
The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files
assessed. Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner
results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s)
to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not
immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was:
- Files considered eligible had to be source code files.
- Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5
lines of source
- File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5
lines).
All documentation files were explicitly excluded.
The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license
identifiers to apply.
- when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was
considered to have no license information in it, and the top level
COPYING file license applied.
For non */uapi/* files that summary was:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 11139
and resulted in the first patch in this series.
If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH
Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0". Results of that was:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|-------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 930
and resulted in the second patch in this series.
- if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one
of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if
any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in
it (per prior point). Results summary:
SPDX license identifier # files
---------------------------------------------------|------
GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 270
GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 169
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) 21
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 17
LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 15
GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 14
((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 5
LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 4
LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note 3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) 3
((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT) 1
and that resulted in the third patch in this series.
- when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became
the concluded license(s).
- when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a
license but the other didn't, or they both detected different
licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred.
- In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file
resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and
which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics).
- When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was
confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
- If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier,
the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later
in time.
In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the
spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the
source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation
by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation.
Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from
FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners
disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights. The
Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so
they are related.
Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets
for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the
files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks
in about 15000 files.
In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have
copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the
correct identifier.
Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual
inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch
version early this week with:
- a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected
license ids and scores
- reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+
files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct
- reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license
was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied
SPDX license was correct
This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction. This
worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the
different types of files to be modified.
These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg. Thomas wrote a script to
parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the
format that the file expected. This script was further refined by Greg
based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to
distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different
comment types.) Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to
generate the patches.
Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@nexb.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Patch series "kexec/fadump: remove dependency with CONFIG_KEXEC and
reuse crashkernel parameter for fadump", v4.
Traditionally, kdump is used to save vmcore in case of a crash. Some
architectures like powerpc can save vmcore using architecture specific
support instead of kexec/kdump mechanism. Such architecture specific
support also needs to reserve memory, to be used by dump capture kernel.
crashkernel parameter can be a reused, for memory reservation, by such
architecture specific infrastructure.
This patchset removes dependency with CONFIG_KEXEC for crashkernel
parameter and vmcoreinfo related code as it can be reused without kexec
support. Also, crashkernel parameter is reused instead of
fadump_reserve_mem to reserve memory for fadump.
The first patch moves crashkernel parameter parsing and vmcoreinfo
related code under CONFIG_CRASH_CORE instead of CONFIG_KEXEC_CORE. The
second patch reuses the definitions of append_elf_note() & final_note()
functions under CONFIG_CRASH_CORE in IA64 arch code. The third patch
removes dependency on CONFIG_KEXEC for firmware-assisted dump (fadump)
in powerpc. The next patch reuses crashkernel parameter for reserving
memory for fadump, instead of the fadump_reserve_mem parameter. This
has the advantage of using all syntaxes crashkernel parameter supports,
for fadump as well. The last patch updates fadump kernel documentation
about use of crashkernel parameter.
This patch (of 5):
Traditionally, kdump is used to save vmcore in case of a crash. Some
architectures like powerpc can save vmcore using architecture specific
support instead of kexec/kdump mechanism. Such architecture specific
support also needs to reserve memory, to be used by dump capture kernel.
crashkernel parameter can be a reused, for memory reservation, by such
architecture specific infrastructure.
But currently, code related to vmcoreinfo and parsing of crashkernel
parameter is built under CONFIG_KEXEC_CORE. This patch introduces
CONFIG_CRASH_CORE and moves the above mentioned code under this config,
allowing code reuse without dependency on CONFIG_KEXEC. There is no
functional change with this patch.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/149035338104.6881.4550894432615189948.stgit@hbathini.in.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Hari Bathini <hbathini@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Dave Young <dyoung@redhat.com>
Cc: Fenghua Yu <fenghua.yu@intel.com>
Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Mahesh Salgaonkar <mahesh@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This patch extends the idea of NMI per-cpu buffers to regions
that may cause recursive printk() calls and possible deadlocks.
Namely, printk() can't handle printk calls from schedule code
or printk() calls from lock debugging code (spin_dump() for instance);
because those may be called with `sem->lock' already taken or any
other `critical' locks (p->pi_lock, etc.). An example of deadlock
can be
vprintk_emit()
console_unlock()
up() << raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags);
wake_up_process()
try_to_wake_up()
ttwu_queue()
ttwu_activate()
activate_task()
enqueue_task()
enqueue_task_fair()
cfs_rq_of()
task_of()
WARN_ON_ONCE(!entity_is_task(se))
vprintk_emit()
console_trylock()
down_trylock()
raw_spin_lock_irqsave(&sem->lock, flags)
^^^^ deadlock
and some other cases.
Just like in NMI implementation, the solution uses a per-cpu
`printk_func' pointer to 'redirect' printk() calls to a 'safe'
callback, that store messages in a per-cpu buffer and flushes
them back to logbuf buffer later.
Usage example:
printk()
printk_safe_enter_irqsave(flags)
//
// any printk() call from here will endup in vprintk_safe(),
// that stores messages in a special per-CPU buffer.
//
printk_safe_exit_irqrestore(flags)
The 'redirection' mechanism, though, has been reworked, as suggested
by Petr Mladek. Instead of using a per-cpu @print_func callback we now
keep a per-cpu printk-context variable and call either default or nmi
vprintk function depending on its value. printk_nmi_entrer/exit and
printk_safe_enter/exit, thus, just set/celar corresponding bits in
printk-context functions.
The patch only adds printk_safe support, we don't use it yet.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161227141611.940-4-sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Calvin Owens <calvinowens@fb.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Peter Hurley <peter@hurleysoftware.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Add a configuration option to set the default console loglevel. This
is, as before, still possible to override at runtime through bootargs
(loglevel=<x>), sysrq and /proc/printk.
There are cases where adding additional arguments on the commandline is
impractical, and changing the default for the kernel when being built
makes more sense. Provide such a method here, for those who choose to
do so.
Also, while touching this code, clarify the difference between
MESSAGE_LOGLEVEL_DEFAULT and CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_DEFAULT.
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1479676829-30031-1-git-send-email-olof@lixom.net
Signed-off-by: Olof Johansson <olof@lixom.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Commit 4bcc595ccd ("printk: reinstate KERN_CONT for printing
continuation lines") allows to define more message headers for a single
message. The motivation is that continuous lines might get mixed.
Therefore it make sense to define the right log level for every piece of
a cont line.
The current btrfs_printk() macros do not support continuous lines at the
moment. But better be prepared for a custom messages and avoid
potential "lvl" buffer overflow.
This patch iterates over the entire message header. It is interested
only into the message level like the original code.
This patch also introduces PRINTK_MAX_SINGLE_HEADER_LEN. Three bytes
are enough for the message level header at the moment. But it used to
be three, see the commit 04d2c8c83d ("printk: convert the format for
KERN_<LEVEL> to a 2 byte pattern").
Also I fixed the default ratelimit level. It looked very strange when it
was different from the default log level.
[pmladek@suse.com: Fix a check of the valid message level]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20161111183236.GD2145@dhcp128.suse.cz
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1478695291-12169-4-git-send-email-pmladek@suse.com
Signed-off-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Acked-by: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Jason Wessel <jason.wessel@windriver.com>
Cc: Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz>
Cc: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Cc: Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Long long ago the kernel log buffer was a buffered stream of bytes, very
much like stdio in user space. It supported log levels by scanning the
stream and noticing the log level markers at the beginning of each line,
but if you wanted to print a partial line in multiple chunks, you just
did multiple printk() calls, and it just automatically worked.
Except when it didn't, and you had very confusing output when different
lines got all mixed up with each other. Then you got fragment lines
mixing with each other, or with non-fragment lines, because it was
traditionally impossible to tell whether a printk() call was a
continuation or not.
To at least help clarify the issue of continuation lines, we added a
KERN_CONT marker back in 2007 to mark continuation lines:
4749252776 ("printk: add KERN_CONT annotation").
That continuation marker was initially an empty string, and didn't
actuall make any semantic difference. But it at least made it possible
to annotate the source code, and have check-patch notice that a printk()
didn't need or want a log level marker, because it was a continuation of
a previous line.
To avoid the ambiguity between a continuation line that had that
KERN_CONT marker, and a printk with no level information at all, we then
in 2009 made KERN_CONT be a real log level marker which meant that we
could now reliably tell the difference between the two cases.
5fd29d6ccb ("printk: clean up handling of log-levels and newlines")
and we could take advantage of that to make sure we didn't mix up
continuation lines with lines that just didn't have any loglevel at all.
Then, in 2012, the kernel log buffer was changed to be a "record" based
log, where each line was a record that has a loglevel and a timestamp.
You can see the beginning of that conversion in commits
e11fea92e1 ("kmsg: export printk records to the /dev/kmsg interface")
7ff9554bb5 ("printk: convert byte-buffer to variable-length record buffer")
with a number of follow-up commits to fix some painful fallout from that
conversion. Over all, it took a couple of months to sort out most of
it. But the upside was that you could have concurrent readers (and
writers) of the kernel log and not have lines with mixed output in them.
And one particular pain-point for the record-based kernel logging was
exactly the fragmentary lines that are generated in smaller chunks. In
order to still log them as one recrod, the continuation lines need to be
attached to the previous record properly.
However the explicit continuation record marker that is actually useful
for this exact case was actually removed in aroundm the same time by commit
61e99ab8e3 ("printk: remove the now unnecessary "C" annotation for KERN_CONT")
due to the incorrect belief that KERN_CONT wasn't meaningful. The
ambiguity between "is this a continuation line" or "is this a plain
printk with no log level information" was reintroduced, and in fact
became an even bigger pain point because there was now the whole
record-level merging of kernel messages going on.
This patch reinstates the KERN_CONT as a real non-empty string marker,
so that the ambiguity is fixed once again.
But it's not a plain revert of that original removal: in the four years
since we made KERN_CONT an empty string again, not only has the format
of the log level markers changed, we've also had some usage changes in
this area.
For example, some ACPI code seems to use KERN_CONT _together_ with a log
level, and now uses both the KERN_CONT marker and (for example) a
KERN_INFO marker to show that it's an informational continuation of a
line.
Which is actually not a bad idea - if the continuation line cannot be
attached to its predecessor, without the log level information we don't
know what log level to assign to it (and we traditionally just assigned
it the default loglevel). So having both a log level and the KERN_CONT
marker is not necessarily a bad idea, but it does mean that we need to
actually iterate over potentially multiple markers, rather than just a
single one.
Also, since KERN_CONT was still conceptually needed, and encouraged, but
didn't actually _do_ anything, we've also had the reverse problem:
rather than having too many annotations it has too few, and there is bit
rot with code that no longer marks the continuation lines with the
KERN_CONT marker.
So this patch not only re-instates the non-empty KERN_CONT marker, it
also fixes up the cases of bit-rot I noticed in my own logs.
There are probably other cases where KERN_CONT will be needed to be
added, either because it is new code that never dealt with the need for
KERN_CONT, or old code that has bitrotted without anybody noticing.
That said, we should strive to avoid the need for KERN_CONT. It does
result in real problems for logging, and should generally not be seen as
a good feature. If we some day can get rid of the feature entirely,
because nobody does any fragmented printk calls, that would be lovely.
But until that point, let's at mark the code that relies on the hacky
multi-fragment kernel printk's. Not only does it avoid the ambiguity,
it also annotates code as "maybe this would be good to fix some day".
(That said, particularly during single-threaded bootup, the downsides of
KERN_CONT are very limited. Things get much hairier when you have
multiple threads going on and user level reading and writing logs too).
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This reverts commit 874f9c7da9.
Geert Uytterhoeven reports:
"This change seems to have an (unintendent?) side-effect.
Before, pr_*() calls without a trailing newline characters would be
printed with a newline character appended, both on the console and in
the output of the dmesg command.
After this commit, no new line character is appended, and the output
of the next pr_*() call of the same type may be appended, like in:
- Truncating RAM at 0x0000000040000000-0x00000000c0000000 to -0x0000000070000000
- Ignoring RAM at 0x0000000200000000-0x0000000240000000 (!CONFIG_HIGHMEM)
+ Truncating RAM at 0x0000000040000000-0x00000000c0000000 to -0x0000000070000000Ignoring RAM at 0x0000000200000000-0x0000000240000000 (!CONFIG_HIGHMEM)"
Joe Perches says:
"No, that is not intentional.
The newline handling code inside vprintk_emit is a bit involved and
for now I suggest a revert until this has all the same behavior as
earlier"
Reported-by: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Requested-by: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
