confused by how to generate kernel messages via /dev/kmsg

[Robert P. J. Day]

  (while this is probably not technically a fedora rawhide issue,
since i'm trying this on rawhide, i figure this would be the best
place to ask about it.)

  i really should know how to do this, but i'm confused about what
happens when i try to configure which "kernel" messages i generate
actually go to the console.

  on my rawhide system, my current log level settings are:

# cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk
8	4	1	7
#

for which my long-time understanding is that the first value
represents the value less than which messages of that loglevel will
appear on the system console -- and a value of 8 means all of them.

  so having earlier set that first value manually with:

# echo 8 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

i can now experiment by generating messages in userspace with
variations like:

# echo "<0> level 0" > /dev/kmsg
# echo "<1> level 1" > /dev/kmsg
# echo "<7> level 7" > /dev/kmsg

and so on. now if i follow the contents of dmesg in real time with:

$ dmesg -w

i can indeed see all of these messages adding their brief contents to
the dmesg buffer as i generate them.

  *however*, only messages with log level 0 are immediately dumped to
all of the open xterm windows in my graphical session, which i equate
with the system console. any messages with log levels 1 through 7 do
*not* show up that way.

  what am i misunderstanding here?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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