[PATCH v3] printk: Have printk() never buffer its data

[Kay Sievers]

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:42 PM, Joe Perches <joe at perches.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-07-08 at 19:55 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
>
>> At the same time the CPU#2 prints the same warning with a continuation
>> line, but the buffer from CPU#1 can not be flushed to the console, nor
>> can the continuation line printk()s from CPU#2 be merged at this point.
>> The consoles are still locked and busy with replaying the old log
>> messages, so the new continuation data is just stored away in the record
>> buffer as it is coming in.
>> If the console would be registered a bit earlier, or the warning would
>> happen a bit later, we would probably not see any of this.
>>
>> I can fake something like this just by holding the console semaphore
>> over a longer time and printing continuation lines with different CPUs
>> in a row.
>>
>> The patch below seems to work for me. It is also here:
>>   http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kay/patches.git;a=blob;f=kmsg-merge-cont.patch;hb=HEAD
>>
>> It only applies cleanly on top of this patch:
>>   http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kay/patches.git;a=blob;f=kmsg-syslog-1-byte-read.patch;hb=HEAD
>>
>
> Hi Kay.
>
> I just ran a test with what's in Greg's driver-core -for-linus branch.
>
> One of the differences in dmesg is timestamping of consecutive
>         pr_<level>("foo...)
> followed directly by
>         pr_cont("bar...")
>
> For instance: (dmesg is 3.4, dmesg.0 is 3.5-rc6+)
>
> # grep MAP /var/log/dm* -A1
> dmesg:[    0.781687] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 P2 P1 P3 ]
> dmesg-[    0.781707] ata2: port disabled--ignoring
> --
> dmesg.0:[    0.948881] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [
> dmesg.0-[    0.948883]  P0 P2 P1 P3 ]
>
> These messages originate starting at
> drivers/ata/ata_piix.c:1354
>
> All the continuations are emitted with pr_cont.
>
> I think this output should still be coalesced without
> timestamp deltas.  Perhaps the timestamping code can
> still be reworked to avoid too small a delta producing
> a new timestamp and another dmesg line.

Hmm, I don't see that.

If I do:
  pr_info("[");
  for (i = 0; i < 4; i++)
       pr_cont("%i ", i);
  pr_cont("]\n");

I get:
  6,173,0;[0 1 2 3 ]

And if I fill the cont buffer and forcefully hold the console sem
during all that, and we can't merge anymore, I get:
  6,167,0;[
  4,168,0;0
  4,169,0;1
  4,170,0;2
  4,171,0;3
  4,172,0;]

But the output is still all fine for both lines:
  [    0.000000] [0 1 2 3 ]
  [    0.000000] [0 1 2 3 ]

What do I miss?

Kay