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

[Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:21:10 -0500
Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 11:15:26AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:51:13 +0900
> > Keiichi KII <k-keiichi@bx.jp.nec.com> 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?
> 
> Yeah, that's a bit of a head-scratcher.
> 
> > 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??
> 
> We don't really have anything that corresponds to netpoll's
> connections at higher levels.
> 
> I'm tempted to say we should make this work more like the dummy
> network device. ie:
> 
> modprobe netconsole -o netcon1 [params]
> modprobe netconsole -o netcon2 [params]

The configuration of netconsole's looks like the configuration of routes.
Granted you probably have more routes than netconsoles, but the interface
issues are similar.  Netlink with a small application wouldn't be nice.
And having /proc/net/netconsole (read-only) would be good for the netlink
impaired.