Hi! I tried to figure out the origin of the bug reported by Pekka Paalanen about the broken pipe: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2008/9/15/3305224 When I add a trace_mark with the boot tracer, I had this same problem but this time it was easy to reproduce. When it calls a tracer's print_line callback, the print_trace_line function in trace.c returns whithout verifying if it could handle the entry properly. And actually the seq could be empty. For example the boot_tracer don't handle TRACE_PRINT. Nevertheless it wants them to be printed as a default way. So print_trace_line function should relay on the other functions which could handle an output if one of them fail. Reported-by: Pekka Paalanen Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker ---