Re: early_printk accessing __log_buf

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Mon Jul 23 2007 - 18:35:55 EST


On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:15:37 -0400
Robin Getz <rgetz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon 23 Jul 2007 16:15, Andrew Morton pondered:
> > This code would be
> > simpler if it did not attempt to read more than one char at a time. It
> > will be plenty fast enough.
>
> When systems have NMI kick off due to power failure, and you want to grab the
> log buffer to write it to flash before power really dies - every cycle
> counts.
>
> A single function which does the copy as a loop (existing) is going to be much
> faster than the overhead of 1024 function calls to copy the last k.

I'd expect the overhead of the (fully-cached) instructions to be
insignificant compared to the time to write to flash?

> > The magical interpretation of len isn't very nice.
>
> There are lots of places in the kernel which have magic in them :)

Lots of the kernel is pretty crappy. One of our main tools for fixing that is to
ensure that new stuff is non-crappy.

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