Corrupt entries in /var/log/messages?

Dan Nelson dnelson at allantgroup.com
Thu Aug 25 06:22:21 GMT 2005


In the last episode (Aug 24), Chris St Denis said:
> Occasionally I get entries like this in my log. It looks like more
> than one process is logging at the same time. Shouldn't syslogd be
> thread/SMP/concurrency safe from this kind of thing?
> 
> Aug 24 05:29:44 sakura kernel: <<66>>ppiidd  119942486 9( (hthttptdpd)),, uiudi d 808:0 :e xeixtietde do no ns isginganla l 1111

Syslog is a single-threaded process, but that line is a console log
entry, and two process that coredump simultaneously on an SMP machine
will cause both CPUs to printf a message to the console simultaneously,
which gives you your interleaved output.

> In an unrelated note, I'm getting a few " *** POKED TIMER ***"
> messages in the syslog from named, anyone know what this is? I found
> a few questions about in the archive, but no answers (telling
> somebody to search the archive isn't any good when that's the only
> answer found)

It's a debugging message that prints when pthread_cond_timedwait()
doesn't return correctly.  Within the last month or so (depending on
what branch you're running), /usr/sbin/named was switched to be built
non-threaded, so if you update your tree and rebuild named, the message
will disappear.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com


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