Re: [PATCH v1 00/11] pstore: support crash log to block and mtd device

Kees Cook
2020-02-06T09:13:31Z

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 09:03:42AM +0800, WeiXiong Liao wrote:
> Why do we need to log to block (mtd) device?
> 1. Most embedded intelligent equipment have no persistent ram, which
> increases costs. We perfer to cheaper solutions, like block devices.
> 2. Do not any equipment have battery, which means that it lost all data
> on general ram if power failure. Pstore has little to do for these
> equipments.
>
> Why do we need mtdpstore instead of mtdoops?
> 1. repetitive jobs between pstore and mtdoops
> Both of pstore and mtdoops do the same jobs that store panic/oops log.
> 2. do what a driver should do
> To me, a driver should provide methods instead of policies. What MTD
> should do is to provide read/write/erase operations, geting rid of codes
> about chunk management, kmsg dumper and configuration.
> 3. enhanced feature
> Not only store log, but also show it as files.
> Not only log, but also trigger time and trigger count.
> Not only panic/oops log, but also log recorder for pmsg, console and
> ftrace in the future.

Hi! Sorry for the delay in my review of this series -- it's been a busy
couple of weeks for me. :) I'm still travelling this week, but I want to
give this a good review. I really like the idea of having a block device
backend for pstore; I'm excited to get this feature landed.

I think there may be a lot of redundancy between ramoops and the block
code in this series, but I suspect the refactoring of that can happen at
a later time. I'd like to get this reviewed and tested and see if I can
land it in the v5.7 merge window.

I hope to have time to focus on this next week once I'm back in my
normal timezone. ;)

Thanks again!

-Kees

--
Kees Cook