linux-kernel - Re: Hardware Error Kernel Mini-Summit

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Message-ID: <20100519070919.GA9618@elte.hu>
Date:	Wed, 19 May 2010 09:09:19 +0200
From:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To:	Borislav Petkov <bp@...64.org>
Cc:	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	"Luck, Tony" <tony.luck@...el.com>,
	Hidetoshi Seto <seto.hidetoshi@...fujitsu.com>,
	Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@...hat.com>,
	"Young, Brent" <brent.young@...el.com>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@...l.com>,
	Doug Thompson <dougthompson@...ssion.com>,
	Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>,
	"bluesmoke-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net" 
	<bluesmoke-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net>,
	Linux Edac Mailing List <linux-edac@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Hardware Error Kernel Mini-Summit

* Borislav Petkov <bp@...64.org> wrote:

> From: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
> Date: Tue, May 18, 2010 at 09:14:09PM -0400
> 
> > - Errors that occur frequently. That is broken 
> >   hardware of one time or another.  I want to know 
> >   about that so I can schedule down time to replace my 
> >   memory before I get an uncorrected ECC error.  
> >   Errors of this kind are likely happening frequently 
> >   enough as to impact performance.
> 
> This is exactly the reason why we need a better error 
> logging and reporting than a log.
>
> [ ... lots of specific details snipped ... ]

Basically the idea behind the generic structured logging 
framework (the perf events kernel subsystem) is to have 
both ASCII output (where desired: critical errors), but to 
also have well-specified event format parsable to 
user-space tools.

Plus there's the need for fast, lightweight, flexible 
event passing mechanism - which is given by the perf 
events transport which enables arbitrary size in-memory 
ring-buffers, poll() and epoll support, etc.

perf events supports all these different usecases and 
comes with a (constantly growing) set of events already 
defined upstream. We've got more than a dozen different 
upstream subsystems that have defined events and we have 
over a hundred individual events. There's a rapidly 
growing tool space that makes case by case use of these 
event sources to measure/observe various aspects of the 
system.

Regarding dmesg, there's a WIP patch on lkml that 
integrates printks into this framework as well - makes 
each printk also available as a special string event.

That way a tool can have both programmatic access to 
printk output (without having to interact with the syslog 
buffer itself) - together with all the other structured 
log sources, while humans can also see what is happening.

Thanks,

	Ingo
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