klibc and logging

[H. Peter Anvin]

Okay... I think klibc is starting to get pretty much to the point where 
it will need to be, although I'm sure there will be plenty of bugs once 
we start using it heavily -- and it still needs RPC support code for 
mounting NFS :(

However, I'm wondering what to do about logging.  Kernel log messages 
get stored away until klogd gets started, but early userspace may need 
some way to log messages -- and syslog is obviously not running.  The 
easiest way to do this would probably be to be able to write to 
/proc/kmsg (which probably really should be /dev/kmsg) and push messages 
onto the kernel's message queue; but we could also have a dedicated 
location in the initramfs for writing logs, and do it all in userspace. 
  In the latter case there needs to be a convention to make sure this 
file is actually present in the namespace at the time syslog starts, and 
of course syslog needs to know about it...

	-hpa