Re: printk regression?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Joe Perches wrote:
> 
> There's at least 72 of them:
> 
> $ grep -Pr --include=*.[ch] "\bprintk.*\\\n.*KERN_" *

Yes. Most of these seem to be of the type that have just "\n" in front - 
probably exactly because the old code wasn't smart enough to notice the 
log-level unless it started a line.

For those cases, the trivial fix is to just remove the "\n". The new world 
order for printk is very much a simplification: the log-level is _always_ 
at the front of the printk, and printk will add the newline automatically 
if a log-level exists (unless it's KERN_CONT, of course).

So a simple

	sed 's/printk("\n"[ 	]*KERN_/printk(KERN_/'

should basically take care of it.

Of course, some cases are just crazy. Here's one:

	arch/m68knommu/kernel/traps.c:          printk(KERN_CONT "\n" KERN_EMERG " [%08lx] ", addr);

and I have no clue about why it would have KERN_CONT there. That makes 
little sense. Again, with the new printk logic, it really should be just

	printk(KERN_EMERG " [%08lx] ", addr);

and nothing odd.

		Linus