tree e6a319064a5dc2b3c4309b5d27ade7a4e4657e3b
parent 48778464bb7d346b47157d21ffde2af6b2d39110
author Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com> 1592794942 -0600
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1592797640 -0700

Revert "kernel/printk: add kmsg SEEK_CUR handling"

This reverts commit 8ece3b3eb576a78d2e67ad4c3a80a39fa6708809.

This commit broke userspace. Bash uses ESPIPE to determine whether or
not the file should be read using "unbuffered I/O", which means reading
1 byte at a time instead of 128 bytes at a time. I used to use bash to
read through kmsg in a really quite nasty way:

    while read -t 0.1 -r line 2>/dev/null || [[ $? -ne 142 ]]; do
       echo "SARU $line"
    done < /dev/kmsg

This will show all lines that can fit into the 128 byte buffer, and skip
lines that don't. That's pretty awful, but at least it worked.

With this change, bash now tries to do 1-byte reads, which means it
skips all the lines, which is worse than before.

Now, I don't really care very much about this, and I'm already look for
a workaround. But I did just spend an hour trying to figure out why my
scripts were broken. Either way, it makes no difference to me personally
whether this is reverted, but it might be something to consider. If you
declare that "trying to read /dev/kmsg with bash is terminally stupid
anyway," I might be inclined to agree with you. But do note that bash
uses lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_CUR)==>ESPIPE to determine whether or not it's
reading from a pipe.

Cc: Bruno Meneguele <bmeneg@redhat.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Signed-off-by: Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@zx2c4.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>