relay: add buffer-only channels; useful for early logging

Allows one to create and use a channel with no associated files.  Files
can be initialized later.  This is useful in scenarios such as logging in
early code, before VFS is up.  Therefore, such channels can be created and
used as soon as kmem_cache_init() completed.

This is needed by kmemtrace to do tracing in early kernel code.

[kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com: build fix]
Signed-off-by: Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu <eduard.munteanu@linux360.ro>
Cc: Tom Zanussi <tzanussi@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/relay.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/relay.txt
index 094f2d2f38b1..510b722667ac 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/relay.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/relay.txt
@@ -294,6 +294,16 @@ user-defined data with a channel, and is immediately available
 (including in create_buf_file()) via chan->private_data or
 buf->chan->private_data.
 
+Buffer-only channels
+--------------------
+
+These channels have no files associated and can be created with
+relay_open(NULL, NULL, ...). Such channels are useful in scenarios such
+as when doing early tracing in the kernel, before the VFS is up. In these
+cases, one may open a buffer-only channel and then call
+relay_late_setup_files() when the kernel is ready to handle files,
+to expose the buffered data to the userspace.
+
 Channel 'modes'
 ---------------