Re: Useless syslogd

[Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>]

On 02/11/2011 02:33 PM, Gary Thomas wrote:
> On 02/11/2011 03:27 PM, Chris Larson wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Tom Zanussi<tom.zanussi@intel.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 12:47 -0800, Gary Thomas wrote:
>>>> ... at least out of the box.
>>>>
>>>> It seems that syslog is configured to store its messages in
>>>> a buffer (memory only?) by default:
>>>>
>>>> $ cat meta/recipes-core/busybox/files/syslog.conf
>>>> DESTINATION="buffer" # log destinations (buffer file remote)
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> This doesn't seem very useful to me. I know I can override this
>>>> in my platform recipes, but I was just wondering what's the
>>>> rationale? Would it not make more sense to chose DESTINATION="file"?
>>>> Otherwise, where do the messages go? How can I see them?
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think 'logread' is hooked up to read from the buffer, but it seems to
>>> be broken at the moment...
>>
>> logread is indeed the way to access the circular buffer, though it
>> does seem like operating against a file would be more consistent -- I
>> think the original logic was that most of the targeted devices didn't
>> have a writable area to put the logs, other than flash, if that, but
>> using tmpfs seems just as good a solution and the logs can be read in
>> a more traditional fashion..
>
> Indeed. I hacked it before(*) so that /var/log could be ramdisk
> and then rotate the logs to FLASH periodically. Sadly, this
> isn't supported out of the box (at least busybox's logrotate
> insists on keeping the rotated files in /var/log), but I think
> it's the best of both worlds.
>
> (*) using an ad-hoc logrotate that could have the rotated files
> end up in a directory other than /var/log
>

I think this is a good idea, but I don't know that anyone will have the 
time to jump on it right now. May I suggest you open a bug / feature 
enhancement so we don't lose track of this?

-- 
Darren Hart
Intel Open Source Technology Center
Yocto Project - Linux Kernel