Re: [PATCH] Warn if we run out of swap space

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Mon 2009-06-01 22:44:20, Avi Kivity wrote:
> Andrew Morton wrote:
>>> We really should have a machine readable channel for this sort of  
>>> information, so it can be plumbed to a userspace notification bubble 
>>> the user can ignore.
>>>     
>>
>> That could just be printk().  It's a question of a) how to tell
>> userspace which bits to pay attention to and maybe b) adding some
>> more structure to the text.
>>
>> Perhaps careful use of faciliy levels would suffice for a), but I
>> expect that some new tagging scheme would be more practical.
>>   
>
> I thought dmesg was an unreliable channel which can overflow.  It's also  
> prone to attacks by spell checkers.
>
> I prefer reliable binary interfaces to shell explorable text interfaces  
> as I think any feature worth having is much more useful controlled by an  
> application rather than a bored sysadmin.

Ouch and please... don't stop useful printk() warnings just because
some 'pie-in-the-sky future binary protocol'. That's what happened in
ACPI land with battery critical, and it is also why I don't get
battery warnings on some of my machines.

State-of-the art userspace should not be required for reasonable
operation...
								Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html

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