[PATCH 0/4] printk: reimplement LOG_CONT handling

[John Ogness]

On 2020-07-17, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> Make sure you test the case of "fast concurrent readers". The last
> time we did things like this, it was a disaster, because a concurrent
> reader would see and return the _incomplete_ line, and the next entry
> was still being generated on another CPU.
>
> The reader would then decide to return that incomplete line, because
> it had something.
>
> And while in theory this could then be handled properly in user space,
> in practice it wasn't. So you'd see a lot of logging tools that would
> then report all those continuations as separate log events.
>
> Which is the whole point of LOG_CONT - for that *not* to happen.

I expect this is handled correctly since the reader is not given any
parts until a full line is ready, but I will put more focus on testing
this to make sure. Thanks for the regression and testing tips.

> So this is just a heads-up that I will not pull something that breaks
> LOG_CONT because it thinks "user space can handle it". No. User space
> does not handle it, and we need to handle it for the user.

Understood. Petr and Sergey are also strict about this. We are making a
serious effort to avoid breaking things for userspace.

John Ogness