Re: [PATCH 0/5] Preliminary: Add error names & descrptions to printks

From: Daniel Santos
Date: Wed Sep 18 2013 - 18:47:32 EST



On 09/18/2013 06:08 AM, David Howells wrote:
danielfsantos@xxxxxxx wrote:

Typically, we don't care about error messages or names in the kernel because
userspace will manage that. But sometimes we need to output an error number
to printks and that creates a situation where a user, system admistrator or
developer must find an error number reference to figure out what went wrong
with a particular driver or whatever. This patch adds two alternatives at
increasing memory costs:

1. print the number in addition to the name for 2k extra or
2. print the number, name and description for 6k extra.
I like the idea generally - and have occasionally entertained the idea of
implementing it myself. However, I wouldn't bother with the "human readable"
description if we're going to do this. Generally, the symbolic representation
is good enough - and that's what you're going to grep the code for anyway.

David

Yeah, I thought about that too, but I figured that descriptions were already there so I may as well make it an option for the search-engine-impared. :) I was also thinking about system administrators and ordinary users trying to installing device drivers and other such situations where they would have to look at their syslogs or dmesg -- or just the lazy. :)

Daniel
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