Re: [PATCH][RFC] Netconsole debugging tool for 2.6

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:09:20PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 11:33:11AM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 03:13:00PM +0100, Jon Burgess wrote:

quoted

Matt Mackall wrote:

quoted

I've decided to take a stab at resurrecting Ingo's netconsole patch.

Is this different from the netdump patch which RedHat include in their 
kernel?

The RH kernel patch is at
http://www.kernelnewbies.org/kernels/rh9/SOURCES/linux-2.4.18-netdump.patch

Ahh, so that's what's become of it.

Theirs:
- does crashdumps
- does syslog without levels
- has hooks for receive

Mine:
- works in 2.6
- has non-appalling configuration
- works as a built-in and is available earlier in boot
- does syslog with levels (haven't posted this though)

netconsole does syslog with levels, too.  I agree netdump/netconsole
have complete awful configuration.  I was thinking netlink would be a
good configurator.

My personal goal is to have it configured in time to catch stuff in
the boot process so I can avoid plugging into the serial console,
which means everything on the command line. So I've got code to parse
the following:

netconsole=[src-port]@[src-ip]/[<dev>],[tgt-port]@<tgt-ip>/[tgt-macaddr]

The kernel printk <foo> prefixes map into syslog quite nicely.

..and are stripped by printk before the console code is called. The
netdump patch logs everything at level 5:

+               send_syslog_skb(dev, syslog_line, syslog_chars, 5);

My patch adds another entry to console struct for writing with levels.
And adds hostname to messages. Still needs timestamp.
 

In any case, there is my own active effort into cleaning up netdump to
be less x86-specific, and get it ready for mainline.

Maybe we can start discussing converging all these implementations on
netdev@oss.sgi.com?  (that's where the networking developers live)

Not sure that's the right place for it, simply because that's the one
group of people it's not terribly useful for. Especially when I start
talking about hooking it up to kgdb. And the network bits are pretty
much there already.

-- 
Matt Mackall : http://www.selenic.com : of or relating to the moon