[poky] Useless syslogd

[Gary Thomas]

On 02/11/2011 03:27 PM, Chris Larson wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 2:50 PM, Tom Zanussi<tom.zanussi at intel.com>  wrote:
>> On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 12:47 -0800, Gary Thomas wrote:
>>> ... at least out of the box.
>>>
>>> It seems that syslog is configured to store its messages in
>>> a buffer (memory only?) by default:
>>>
>>> $ cat meta/recipes-core/busybox/files/syslog.conf
>>> DESTINATION="buffer"            # log destinations (buffer file remote)
>>>     ...
>>>
>>> This doesn't seem very useful to me.  I know I can override this
>>> in my platform recipes, but I was just wondering what's the
>>> rationale?  Would it not make more sense to chose DESTINATION="file"?
>>> Otherwise, where do the messages go?  How can I see them?
>>>
>>
>> I think 'logread' is hooked up to read from the buffer, but it seems to
>> be broken at the moment...
>
> logread is indeed the way to access the circular buffer, though it
> does seem like operating against a file would be more consistent -- I
> think the original logic was that most of the targeted devices didn't
> have a writable area to put the logs, other than flash, if that, but
> using tmpfs seems just as good a solution and the logs can be read in
> a more traditional fashion..

Indeed. I hacked it before(*) so that /var/log could be ramdisk
and then rotate the logs to FLASH periodically.  Sadly, this
isn't supported out of the box (at least busybox's logrotate
insists on keeping the rotated files in /var/log), but I think
it's the best of both worlds.

(*) using an ad-hoc logrotate that could have the rotated files
end up in a directory other than /var/log

-- 
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Gary Thomas                 |  Consulting for the
MLB Associates              |    Embedded world
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