Re: [PATCH v1 00/12] netoops support

[Mike Waychison <mikew@google.com>]

Américo Wang wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 03:54:45PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 13:29 -0700, Mike Waychison wrote:
>>> Mike Waychison wrote:
>>>> FWIW, another semantic difference between netconsole and netoops (that
>>>> I had missed in the last email) is filtering: we really do want to get
>>>> the whole log when a crash happens, debug messages and all.
>>>> Netconsole is subject to console filtering (which we _do_ want as
>>>> debug messages going out the uart slows the whole world down).
>>>>
>>>> netconsole and netoops _do_ have bits in common, for instance the
>>>> handling of NETDEV events and source+target configuration.  I'd rather
>>>> those bits become common between the two than figure out how to jam
>>>> the semantics we need into netconsole.
>>> Hi Matt,
>>>
>>> I've been reading through the netconsole driver in response to Greg's 
>>> comments on this thread, and it is definitely more robust in terms of 
>>> configuration and handling of network device events than the netoops 
>>> driver I proposed.
>> I've been following the discussion to see if it went anywhere
>> interesting..
>>
>>> What are your thoughts on extending netconsole with the same sort of 
>>> semantics that are in the netoops patchset?
>> My first thought is that it's a bit unfortunate that some of the the
>> netconsole configgy bits weren't implemented in a generic way that would
>> be applicable to other netpoll clients. Some people have never gotten it
>> into their heads that netconsole isn't the only client.
>>
> 
> Really? What are other clients? I remember netdump *was* one client,
> but it is not in upstream and is deprecated, so netconsole is the only
> client in tree, AFAIK.

I see the bonding and bridging drivers using netpoll.

> 
> 
>>> I'd still like to have blit-dmesg-to-the-network-on-oops semantics, 
>>> which seems doable by having a per-target flag for streaming of console 
>>> messages (enabled by default) and a flag to emit a structured full dmesg 
>>> dump (disabled by default).
>> I'd actually like to see you go forward with netoops. It's clear to me
>> that it's a different beast and complexifying netconsole with a bunch of
>> weird new options doesn't really sit well. If that means abstracting
>> some of the sysfs crap from netconsole, great. 
>>
> 
> That would be good.
> 
> 
>> That said, I don't think netoops is an ideal name, given how closely
>> bound oops _events_ are with their textual output. Presumably it covers
>> events other than oopsen like panics too. 
>>
>> Regarding rolling oopses: lots of machines regularly survive oopses, so 
>> I think you ought to consider rate-limiting them (to a configurable rate
>> with a very low default) rather than suppressing all but the first.
>>
> 
> We have WARN_ONCE(), maybe we can make one oops_once()...
> At least, that is not hard.