RE: [PATCH] [RFC] emit-crash-char: Allow diversion of printkoutput for crash logging

[Daniel Walker <dwalker@mvista.com>]

On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 16:24 -0500, Haller, John H (John) wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 16:13 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > 
> > > same sort of things as the point of David's code.  early/crash
> > > scenarios for people to safely extract portions of the kernel log
> > > buffer for transmission/storage elsewhere.  as was explained in the
> > > original thread behind the commit.
> > 
> > How is that code suppose to help anyone if you aren't calling it from
> > anyplace in the kernel? Clearly your using it, right? Where 
> > is the code
> > your calling these functions from?
> > 
> > Daniel
> Not that it was in the patch, but netconsole would be an
> obvious potential user. It would be most useful in board
> specific startup code such as arch/ppc/platforms, where
> a particular board might have a place to put information
> like this for later retrieval. One would hope that such
> board specific file would be forthcoming, rather than be
> maintained out-of-tree.

In the thread where this code was created it was assumed that the
blackfin architecture would use the functions .. However, blackfin
doesn't appear to use it .. Not sure where that code went, but it hasn't
materialized in almost a year.

It basically all comes back to my original point which is don't submit
code that isn't used .. If you have a specific user for the code you can
tailor ifdefs. Then for instance it doesn't bloat non-blackfin
architectures, or non-netconsole users .. Or if it's used only during
init you can flag it with __init and it will be freed after the system
boots. When it's enable and exists it's possible for it to get called
and serve some useful purpose ..

Daniel