On Fri, 2003-04-11 at 12:16, Alan Cox wrote:

> Providing the viewer is translating the originals always exist. Indeed
> you can do
> 
>         LANG=es view-logs
>         LANG=ru view-logs
>         ...
> 
> You can have sysadmins with no common language("not a recommended
> configuration" ;))
> 
> You are right about needing to log parameters, but given a log line
> of the form
> 
> %s: went up in flames\n\0eth0\0\0
> 
> that can be handled by the log viewer

Other contributors have also endorsed the idea of creating a message
log where the format and args are kept separate.  Here's code to do it.

Enclosed is a patch that adds support for logging kernel events to a
structured event log (see evlog.sourceforge.net).  When EVLOG_FWPRINTK
is enabled, printk messages are automatically forwarded to the event
log in this form.  (They are also logged to klogd/syslogd, as usual.)

The log viewer (evlview) can reconstruct the complete message from the
components.  If you provide translations (AKA formatting templates) for
particular messages, and set your LANG environment variable
appropriately,
evlview will display those messages in the selected language.  (Messages
without translations are displayed in English.)

A few more notes about this event-logging support:
- printk calls don't change; one line is added to printk(), about 20 to
printk.c.
- Like syslog, it also handles messages from user space.  There are also
a variety of other ways to use this support to log information from the
kernel.
- User-mode event logging requires no kernel support.
- There's a bunch of stuff that sysadmins and tech support people have
found useful, such as APIs for examining the log and receiving
notification
of events.

See evlog.sourceforge.net for more info.

Jim Keniston
IBM Linux Technology Center