Hi Linus, Andrew,

I was wondering if you could see your way to accepting the attached
patch, which provides access to the syslog buffer pointers.

The basic idea is that if a system has crashed, it can be handy to
be able to view the contents of the syslog buffer.  Unfortunately,
this is currently hard to do.

 --  char __log_buf[] is declared static in printk.c, so it cannot
     be found in the ksyms table.

 -- do_syslog() uses spinlocks to protect the data structure, and
    so will typically deadlock if called.

The 'fix' is to provide a routine that simply returns the pointers
to the log buffer.  

I'd be thrilled to have this patch accepted ... 

--linas

Signed-off-by: Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org>