From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [140.211.169.13]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "smtp.linux-foundation.org", Issuer "CA Cert Signing Authority" (verified OK)) by ozlabs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 151B8DDEF2 for ; Sun, 6 Jul 2008 03:57:52 +1000 (EST) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 10:56:54 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Vegard Nossum Subject: Re: the printk problem In-Reply-To: <20080705125230.GA20166@damson.getinternet.no> Message-ID: References: <20080705125230.GA20166@damson.getinternet.no> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Cc: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org, Matthew Wilcox , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jan Engelhardt , linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, Peter Anvin , Andrew Morton , "David S. Miller" List-Id: Linux on PowerPC Developers Mail List List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Sat, 5 Jul 2008, Vegard Nossum wrote: > On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Jan Engelhardt wrote: > > > > On Saturday 2008-07-05 00:01, Andrew Morton wrote: > >> > >>We don't know how much interest there would be in churning NIPQUAD from > >>the net guys. Interestingly, there's also %C (wint_t) which is a > >>32-bit quantity. So we could just go and say "%C prints an ipv4 > >>address" and be done with it. But there's no way of doing that for > >>ipv6 addresses so things would become asymmetrical there. > > > > struct in6_addr src; > > printk("Source address: %p{ipv6}\n", &src); > > > > How about %p{feature}? No. I _expressly_ chose '%p[alphanumeric]*' because it's basically totally insane to have that in a *real* printk() string: the end result would be totally unreadable. In contrast, '%p[specialchar]' is not unreadable, and in fact we have lots of those already in the kernel. In fact, there are 40 occurrences of '%p{' in the kernel, just grep for it (especially the AFS code seems to be very happy to use that kind of printout in its debug statements). So it makes perfect sense to have a _real_ printk string that says "BUG: Dentry %p{i=%lx,n=%s}" where we have that '%p{...' sequence: the end result is easily parseable. In contrast, anybody who uses '%pS' or something like that and expects a pointer name to be immediately followed by teh letter 'S' is simply insane, because the end result is an unreadable mess. > (It's hard on the stack, yes, I know. We should fix kallsyms.) Not just that, but it's broken when KALLSYMS is disabled. Look at what sprint_symbol() becomes. The patch I already sent out is about a million times better, because it avoids all these issues, and knows about subtle issues like the difference between a direct pointer and a pointer to a function descriptor. Linus