[RFC PATCH] printk: Change timestamp to triplet as mono, boot and real

[Prarit Bhargava]

On 8/11/20 9:02 AM, Petr Mladek wrote:
> On Tue 2020-08-11 14:05:12, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>> Petr Mladek <pmladek at suse.com> writes:
>>> At least "crash" tool would need an update anyway. AFAIK, it checks
>>> the size of struct printk_log and refuses to read it when it changes.
>>>
>>> It means that the hack with VMCOREINFO_FIELD_OFFSET probably is not
>>> needed because we would need to update the crashdump-related tools anyway.
>>>
>>> Well, the timing is good. We are about to switch the printk ring
>>> buffer into a lockless one. It requires updating the crashdump tools
>>> as well. We could do this at the same time. The lockless ring buffer
>>> already is in linux-next. It is aimed for 5.10 or 5.11.
>> ...
>>> It would be great to synchronize all these changes changes of the
>>> printk log buffer structures.
>>
>> I agree that having one update is a good thing, but pretty please can we
>> finally make progress with this and not create yet another dependency?
> 
> To make it clear. I definitely do not want to block lockless printk by
> this.

Thanks for clarifying that.  I had the same concern that tglx had.

> 
> BTW: I am not 100% convinced that storing all three timestamps is
> worth it. It increases the code complexity, metadata size. It needs
> an interface with the userspace that has to stay backward compatible.
> 
> Also it still will be racy because the timestamp is taken when the message
> is printed. It might be "long" before or after the event that
> it talks about.

That scenario plays out today with the current timestamp.  Printing debug with a
better timestamp doesn't resolve that problem nor is it intended to.

> 
> There is still the alternative to print all three timestamps regularly
> for those interested. It is less user convenient but much easier
> to maintain.

While I agree, in general, your alternative is useful for in-person debugging it
is not helpful in cases where a user only has an image of a panic where the
printk time-synch message has scrolled off the screen.

Consider this real debug case where I hacked the boottime stamp into printk:  We
had some systems with flaky HW that hit panics at 10 hours [1] of uptime.  Since
these systems came from different vendors with different HW the clocks were
out-of-sync.  I had a suspicion that it was some human-coded event causing the
HW to die but wasn't sure until I did a boottime-stamped printk to prove that
all the systems died after 10 hours.

I could have set a stopwatch or timer to somehow catch this kind of event.  I
could have set up video cameras to watch the consoles, etc.  There are a lot of
other ways I could have debugged this situation but ultimately the fastest thing
to do was code and provide kernels to the various HW companies and see if
everything lined up as I thought it would.

This problem happens far more often then I'd like to admit and we still see this
type of problem with new HW and FW.  I also recall that other kernel groups
(storage, networking, etc.) were interested in the timestamps as it would make
their debugging easier to have a true synchronized timestamp available.

One other thing -- IIRC I had to modify the dmesg code by providing a sysfs (or
proc?) interface for dmesg to identify the stamp.  It's something that should be
investigated with this code too.

P.

[1] It was 3+ years ago.  I can't remember if it was 10 or 100 but you get the
point.

> 
> Best Regards,
> Petr
>