Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm take4 2/6] support multiple logging

From: Andrew Morton <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:15:26 -0700

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:51:13 +0900
Keiichi KII <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > I started to do some cleanups and fixups here, but abandoned it when it was
> > all getting a bit large.
> > 
> > Here are some fixes against this patch:
> 
> I'm going to fix my patches by following your reviews and send new patches 
> on the LKML and the netdev ML in a few days.
> 

Well..  before you can finish this work we need to decide upon what the
interface to userspace will be.

- The miscdev isn't appropriate

- netlink remains a possibility

- Stephen suggests an ioctl against a socket and davem suggests socket
  options, but it's unclear to me how that socket will get bound to
  netconsole?

either way, I agree with the overall thrust of this work: netconsole is
useful in production environments, can become more useful and will need
runtime configurability.

I wonder if we're approaching this in the right way, however...

At a high level, netconsole is just a flow of UDP packets between two
machines.  The kernel already has rich and well-understood ways of creating
and configuring such flows.

So...  instead of creating a brand new way of configuring such a flow via
sysfs and ioctl, could we instead create a flow using the existing
mechanisms (presumably the socket API) and then "transfer" the information
from that flow over to netconsole by some means??