Re: printk loglevel policy?

["Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>]

Jim Nelson wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> 
>> On Gwe, 2004-12-31 at 02:20, Coywolf Qi Hunt wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> Recently, I've seen a lot of add loglevel to printk patches. grep 
>>> 'printk("' -r | wc shows me 2433. There are probably 2433 printk
>>> need to patch, is it?  What's this printk loglevel policy, all these
>>
>>
>>
>> You would need to work out which were at the start of a newline - most
>> of them are probably just fine and valid
>>
> 
> That reminds me of a question I've had inthe back of my head.  When you 
> have a SMP system wouldn't it be possible to have:
> 
> CPU 1 (running func1)    CPU 2 (running func2)
>  |             |
>  printk ("foo...");     |
>  |            printk ("bleh\n");
>  printk ("finished\n);     |
>             printk ("readout from bleh\n";
> 
> Is that possible?  Especially if the process on CPU 1 slept on a 
> semaphore or something similar?
> 
> Or does printk() do some tracking that I didn't see as to where in the 
> kernel the strings are coming from?

That kind of garbled output has been known to happen, but
the <console_sem> is supposed to prevent that (along with
zap_locks() in kernel/printk.c).

If it still happens, it needs to be fixed.
David Howells (RH) has posted patches that fix it.

-- 
~Randy