Dear Lee Jones,
In message 20121121150332.GC28899@gmail.com you wrote:
Neither ATAGS not the device tree are intended nor designed for passing logfile information. Yes, you can use them like that, and it will actually work.
ATAGs were exactly designed for this type of thing. To pass small data structures though to the kernel. In our case, our trace-points are held in a small data structure. They're not logs.
You appear to have a specific definition of log data in mind. It must be different to mine.
Also, you contradict yourself - here you write "pass small data structures", earlier you wrote about "lots of trace-points", which sounds as if the total amount of data would be not exactly small - actually so big that yu are afraid of annoying users with it.
Anyway. This doesn't take us further.
They're not poor augments if the data stored isn't log messages, which these aren't. If anything I would say that ramming them in as textual kernel messages, then parsing the log text using a userspace tool was an abuse of the system. If we create them as data in the bootloader, then pass them to the kernel as data, then process them as data, _that_ would be the correct mechanism.
Well, I could pooint out here a number of pretty basic design decisions made earlier in a number of pretty important and successful software projects, like the fact that a large number of internet protocols are based on plain text implementations. Or how useful it is if you can just to a post-mortem dump of the log buffer and actually _read_ the entries, without need to special tools.
I think I should stop here, though. It appears it makes little sense trying to discuss alternative approaches when you have already fixed your mind about the one and only "correct" way to do this.
To summarize: NAK.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk