Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Apr 2014 16:13:27 -0700 | Subject | Re: [RFC PATCH] cmdline: Hide "debug" from /proc/cmdline | From | Linus Torvalds <> |
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On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Mateusz Guzik <mguzik@redhat.com> wrote: > > Well, parsing kernel cmdline by systemd is a bad idea
No, we very much expose /proc/cmdline for a reason. System services are *supposed* to parse it, because it gives a unified way for people to pass in various flags. The kernel doesn't complain about flags it doesn't recognize, exactly because the kernel realizes that "hey, maybe this flag is for something else".
The classic example of this is things like "charset" markers, but also options to modules that modprobe parses etc etc.
And yes, that does include "quiet" and "debug". Parsing them and doing something sane with them is not a bug, it's a feature.
But the problem appears when system services seem to think that they *own* those flags, and nothing else matters, and they don't do something "sane" any more.
And the thing is, this has never really been a problem in practice. Because nobody minds if some kernel option like "debug" makes not only the kernel enable debugging, but some system deamon log a bit more too.
HOWEVER.
It does become a problem when you have a system service developer who thinks the universe revolves around him, and nobody else matters, and people sending him bug-reports are annoyances that should be ignored rather than acknowledged and fixed. At that point, it's a problem.
It looks like Greg has stepped in as a baby-sitter for Kay, and things are going to be fixed. And I'd really like to avoid adding hacky code to the kernel because of Kay's continued bad behavior, so I hope this works. But it's really sad that things like this get elevated to this kind of situation, and I personally find it annoying that it's always the same f*cking primadonna involved.
Steven, Borislav, one thing that strikes me might be a good idea is to limit the amount of non-kernel noise in dmesg. We already have the concept of rate-limiting various spammy internal kernel messages for when device drivers misbehave etc. Maybe we can just add rate-limiting to the interfaces that add messages to the kernel buffers, and work around this problem that way instead while waiting for Gregs fix to percolate? Or are the systemd debug messages going to so many other places too that that wouldn't really help?
Linus
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