Re: [RFC PATCH] cmdline: Hide "debug" from /proc/cmdline

Linus Torvalds
2014-04-04T19:09:23Z

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
>
> What would break if we used CLOCK_BOOTTIME or CLOCK_MONOTONIC?

I wouldn't object to trying - I thought you meant changing the format
itself. If we keep the semantics (seconds since boot) but just change
the clock source in other ways, I wouldn't worry.

Of course, one issue is locking and performance. Most clock sources
are nasty as hell to read. "sched_clock()" is special.

But I'm absolutely ok with trying things out, so if you have an idea
for a patch...

> It would be really neat if we even went back and edited the queued up
> messages once we have a clocksource.

Sounds great, I'd love to see it. Patches welcome ;)

> There are also log message metadata fields now; we could stick more
> than one timestamp in there, and existing tools either won't see them
> at all (if they use klogctl) or they already know how to ignore
> unknown fields (/dev/kmsg).

That sounds like overkill, but trying to aim for something that is
actually accurate to within a second is fine.

That said, I *also* suspect that we could easily just have a simple
heartbeat message that gives accurate real time. Adding a kernel
heartbeat to dmesg is something I've often wanted to have myself.
Having something that prints out real wall-clock time every 30 minutes
or so in dmesg does not sound like a bad idea, and could be used to
correct for time skew with the existing one even if we decided that
CLOCK_BOOTTIME has too many locking/performance issues.

Linus