On (09/28/17 17:43), Calvin Owens wrote:

Not all consoles are created equal: depending on the actual hardware,
the latency of a printk() call can vary dramatically. The worst examples
are serial consoles, where it can spin for tens of milliseconds banging
the UART to emit a message, which can cause application-level problems
when the kernel spews onto the console.

At Facebook we use netconsole to monitor our fleet, but we still have
serial consoles attached on each host for live debugging, and the latter
has caused problems. An obvious solution is to disable the kernel
console output to ttyS0, but this makes live debugging frustrating,
since crashes become silent and opaque to the ttyS0 user. Enabling it on
the fly when needed isn't feasible, since boxes you need to debug via
serial are likely to be borked in ways that make this impossible.

That puts us between a rock and a hard place: we'd love to set
kernel.printk to KERN_INFO and get all the logs. But while netconsole is
fast enough to permit that without perturbing userspace, ttyS0 is not,
and we're forced to limit console logging to KERN_WARNING and higher.

This patch introduces a new per-console loglevel setting, and changes
console_unlock() to use max(global_level, per_console_level) when
deciding whether or not to emit a given log message.

This lets us have our cake and eat it too: instead of being forced to
limit all consoles verbosity based on the speed of the slowest one, we
can "promote" the faster console while still using a conservative system
loglevel setting to avoid disturbing applications.

Hi Calvin,

Do you have time to address the review feedback and re-spin v2?

	-ss