Re: kernel support for non-english user messages

Oliver Neukum
2003-04-09T09:22:05Z

Am Mittwoch, 9. April 2003 10:08 schrieb Matti Aarnio:
> On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 01:02:16AM -0400, Frank Davis wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I wish to suggest a possible 2.6 or 2.7 feature (too late for 2.4.x and
> > 2.5.x, I believe) that I believe would be helpful. Currently, printk
> > messages are all in english, and I was wondering if printk could be
> > modified to print out user messages that are in the default language of
> > the machine. For example,
>
> To propagate the idea further, why not have proper message catalogs,
>
> and that way translations. Instead of:
> > printk(KERN_WARN "This driver is messed up!\n");
>
> There would be:
> printk(KERN_WARN "1234-6789 this driver is messed up!\n")
>
> In the old days of big iron beasts, there used to be multivolume
> binders full of system messages, and their explanations.
> Searching went thru those "1234-5678" strings.
>
> There were sets of those manuals in a number of customer languages.

If we do this, why not go the whole way?
Could we compute a hash value for every message that's not KERN_CRIT,
use it to create a table of messages and hashes and replace the messages
in the kernel image with the hash values leaving expansion to klogd?

Regards
Oliver