RE: printf internals

From: Siva Prasad
Date: Wed Dec 19 2007 - 17:37:17 EST


Thank you very much for your response Clemens.

I tried strace on a regular system. It does not show which tty, etc., as it uses the stdout (fd = 1) and write(1, ...) to it.

This is not a student project. I am trying to build my own kernel and ramdisk. Kernel boots fine to a point where it starts accessing ramdisk and executes init scripts. From there on nothing gets printed. I did some debugging and found that prints of user land programs are not coming to the serial console, while kernel prints are working fine. I found all the programs getting executed, by placing a printk in execve routine and printing the arguments.

So, I wanted to trace down the path from user program to the kernel and see why it is not printing messages from user program. I placed a printk in drivers/char/tty_io.c:tty_write() and it is not getting called from my file system. I tried the same thing on my good system (say regular PC) and it works as expected.

Any clues that can help debug this issue is highly appreciated.
How can I get access to the same printf string inside kernel.

Thanks
Siva



-----Original Message-----
From: Clemens Koller [mailto:clemens.koller@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 8:16 AM
To: David Newall
Cc: Siva Prasad; linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: printf internals

David Newall schrieb:
> Siva Prasad wrote:
>> I am looking at how exactly does the printf in user programs succeeds in
>> displaying characters to the serial console.
>
> Is it a student assignment? This is so not the right mailing list.

Come on, are we playing hide and seek here?

You can use strace to follow a typical hello world example and
see what device it opens to feed the hello out.
I.e. it can be to the current /dev/ttyX and not to /dev/console
or if you are logged in via SSH to a machine, the device
is again different... or if you use screen, ...

Work your way from there and then use a Linux Source code
Cross Reference (lxr, ask Google for one) and follow the code.

Regards,
--
Clemens Koller
__________________________________
R&D Imaging Devices
Anagramm GmbH
Rupert-Mayer-Straße 45/1
Linhof Werksgelände
D-81379 München
Tel.089-741518-50
Fax 089-741518-19
http://www.anagramm-technology.com

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/