[RFC] Prepend timestamp in msgbuf

[Alexander Best]

On Fri Oct 14 11, Alexander Best wrote:
> On Fri Oct 14 11, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> > In message <20111014085609.GA3799 at freebsd.org>, Alexander Best writes:
> > 
> > >1) would it be possible to prepend those timestamps to the actual console
> > >output and not only to the output of demsg? maybe via a sysctl toggle?
> > 
> > The kernel does not know enough about timezones to emit anything
> > but UTC timestamps.
> 
> hmm ok.
> 
> > 
> > >2) my dmesg output contains a lot of these entries: "<118>"
> > 
> > These are magic markers for syslogd(8) specifying priority.
> 
> it would be nice, if their output could be turned off via a dmesg flag imo.
> 
> > 
> > >3) roughly the first 30 lines of my dmesg output have the timestamp "[1.0]".
> > >would it be possible to have more accuracy there?
> > 
> > No, because we don't know the time until we've found the RTC chip.
> 
> maybe prepending the output with [??] instead of [1.0] would make more sense,
> so users knows that those timestamps are bogus.

maybe the granularity of the timestamps could be limited to a static value? the
following output doesn't really look pretty:

[7.729516] <118>/dev/ufs/varfs: clean, 879143 free (7407 frags, 108967 blocks, 0.7% fragmentation)
[7.891512] <118>Mounting local file systems:WARNING: TMPFS is considered to be a highly experimental feature in FreeBSD.
[8.33519] .
[9.440514] <118>Setting hostname: otaku.
[9.744516] wlan0: Ethernet address: 00:0f:b5:82:07:c8
[9.850516] <118>Starting wpa_supplicant.
[10.335514] <118>Starting Network: lo0 ath0.

so it would be nice, if trailing zeros got printed out, too.

cheers.
alex

> 
> cheers.
> alex
> 
> > 
> > -- 
> > Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> > phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> > FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.