How to add message that will be read with dmesg?

Question

I am trying to write some custom messages in my dmesg output. I tried:

logger "Hello"

but this does not work. It exits without error, but no "Hello" appears int the output of:

dmesg

I am using a Fedora 9, and it seems that there is no syslogd/klogd daemon running. However, all my kernel messages are succesfully written in the dmesg buffer.

Any idea?

Answer 1

dmesg displays what is the kernel buffer, where is logger is for syslogd. I think if you want to print things into the kernel buffer you will need to create a driver that uses the printk() kernel function. If you just want it in /var/log/messages , than with a 'normal' setup I think what you have done with logger is already fine.

The most basic example of a driver with printk() would be:

hello.c:

#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>

int init_module(void)
{
    printk(KERN_INFO "Hello world\n");
    return 0;
}

void cleanup_module(void)
{
    printk(KERN_INFO "Goodbye world\n");

}

Makefile:

obj-m += hello.o

all:
    make -C /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build M=$(PWD) modules

Then:

$ make
$ sudo insmod hello.ko
$ dmesg | tail -n1
 [7089996.746366] Hello world

http://tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/lkmpg.html#AEN121 for more...

Answer 2

You can, as root, write to /dev/kmsg to print to the kernel message buffer:

 fixnum:~# echo Some message > /dev/kmsg
 fixnum:~# dmesg | tail -n1
 [28078118.692242] Some message

I've tested this on my server and an embedded Linux device, and it works on both, so I'm just going to assume it works pretty much everywhere.

Answer 3

Based on Kyle's module above:

#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/proc_fs.h>
#include <asm/uaccess.h>

static int pk_write(struct file *file, const char *buffer, unsigned long count, void *data)
{
        char string[256];
        count = count < 255 ? count : 255;

        if(copy_from_user(string, buffer, count))
                return -EFAULT;

        string[count] = '\0';        
        printk(string);
        return count;
}


static int __init printk_init(void)
{
        struct proc_dir_entry *pk_file;

        pk_file = create_proc_entry("printk", 0222, NULL);
        if(pk_file == NULL)
                return -ENOMEM;

        pk_file->write_proc = pk_write;
        pk_file->owner = THIS_MODULE;

        return 0;
}

static void __exit printk_cleanup(void)
{
        remove_proc_entry("printk", NULL);
}

module_init(printk_init);
module_exit(printk_cleanup);
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");

To do a printk from user space:

echo "Hello" > /proc/printk

Answer 4

Based off of Kyle's answer, here is a quick tutorial showing how to do just that.