From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail203.messagelabs.com (mail203.messagelabs.com [216.82.254.243]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 602985F0019 for ; Wed, 3 Jun 2009 13:22:33 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2009 11:15:44 +0200 From: Pavel Machek Subject: Re: [PATCH] Warn if we run out of swap space Message-ID: <20090602091544.GC15756@elf.ucw.cz> References: <4A23FF89.2060603@redhat.com> <20090601123503.2337a79b.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <4A242F94.9010704@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4A242F94.9010704@redhat.com> Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org To: Avi Kivity Cc: Andrew Morton , cl@linux-foundation.org, linux-mm@kvack.org, dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com List-ID: On Mon 2009-06-01 22:44:20, Avi Kivity wrote: > Andrew Morton wrote: >>> We really should have a machine readable channel for this sort of >>> information, so it can be plumbed to a userspace notification bubble >>> the user can ignore. >>> >> >> That could just be printk(). It's a question of a) how to tell >> userspace which bits to pay attention to and maybe b) adding some >> more structure to the text. >> >> Perhaps careful use of faciliy levels would suffice for a), but I >> expect that some new tagging scheme would be more practical. >> > > I thought dmesg was an unreliable channel which can overflow. It's also > prone to attacks by spell checkers. > > I prefer reliable binary interfaces to shell explorable text interfaces > as I think any feature worth having is much more useful controlled by an > application rather than a bored sysadmin. Ouch and please... don't stop useful printk() warnings just because some 'pie-in-the-sky future binary protocol'. That's what happened in ACPI land with battery critical, and it is also why I don't get battery warnings on some of my machines. State-of-the art userspace should not be required for reasonable operation... Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org