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

Avi Kivity
2009-06-03T14:52:14Z

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.

--
I have a truly marvellous patch that fixes the bug which this
signature is too narrow to contain.