kernel support for non-english user messages

Frank Davis
2003-04-09T04:49:44Z

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,

printk(KERN_WARN "This driver is messed up!\n", 'en'); //Prints the
english text .

printk(KERN_WARN "This driver is messed up!\n", 'wel'); //Prints the
welsh translation of the english text.

printk(KERN_WARN "This driver is messed up!\n", getdefaultlanguage());

I'm looking for a possible uniform design to make this happen, short of
adding a complete machine translation module to the kernel. :) Userland
internationalization support is already provided(I haven't personally
used other languages besides English, but I've seen the options), but a
kernel module or printk addition that handles localized kernel messages
seems reasonable.

Thoughts, comments?

Regards,
Frank