[U-Boot] Network based logging with U-Boot

[Matthew Lear]

Hi Wolfgang,
Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Matthew Lear,
> 
> In message <4A896ED5.3010807 at bubblegen.co.uk> you wrote:

[snip]

>> I've got netconsole running via netcat on a host pc but this is console
>> only and is not ideal for a multi-platform deployment model. Although,
> 
> "not ideal"? What exactly are you missing?
> 
>> saying that, I suppose that doing 'set ncip <server ip>' and 'set stdout
>> nc' and running netcat on a host pc would provide some level of diagnostics.
>>
>> Is anybody able to offer any advice or strategy here for similar
>> requirements?
> 
> Try to explain what your exact problems with netconsole are.

Firstly, perhaps the problems I have with netcat and U-Boot netconsole
are partly to do with the 'listener' software itself (ie netcat),
running on <server ip>.  AFAIK the 'mapping' of netcat to target ip
address in order to utilise U-Boot's netconsole is one-to-one, ie netcat
is unable to listen on an ip address range because it performs a lookup
on the address and this obviously fails for an ip address range. I may
be wrong here but from what I can tell, listening on an ip range with
netcat is not possible. If it was, then this would solve part of my problem.

Of course, there may be other listeners which may be able to do this..?

Secondly, if there is a centralised logging machine (<server ip>), then
ideally, the messages received from U-Boot's netconsole would be
prefixed with an identifier in order to differentiate one device running
U-Boot from another. The prefix could be a U-Boot env hostname, ip
address, MAC address or some other identifier/variable. If this was
possible then each platform could be differentiated easily at the server
end.

I suppose my end goal is to have something akin or analogous to multiple
platforms running Linux and logging over syslog to a server machine
running syslogd.

Does that help?

Best regards,
--  Matt