Dmesg and dates...

[Sicily1918]

Sorry for the lame question:

How do you make dmesg display the date/time of an event, instead of the seconds from last boot? I can see how that would be useful at times, but I rely on it the old-fashioned way and I find it difficult to look at stuff that's preceded by 8532387.23313 -- I'd rather it say 12-MAR-11 23:45... help?

P.S. This is on F14.

[vallimar]

As far as I am aware, it doesn't support that as an option. I find the seconds counter very
annoying as well so I disable it in my custom kernel builds.

Keep in mind that stuff in the log buffers that dmesg prints, also tend to be logged in other files
which do usually contain the time/date stamp. Check /var/log/messages for general messages
and other files therein for other information.

[marko]

I found a guy's webpage that wrote a perl script that will format your dmesg output to show the
real time:
http://regerar.se/2011/02/21/human-r...esg-timestamp/

[jpollard]

The seconds (and fraction) are very useful for identifying problem when they occur on multiple CPUs as otherwise it is entirely possible for two (or more) messages to show the same time stamp - making it difficult to know which one occurred first.

[Sicily1918]

Originally Posted by jpollard

The seconds (and fraction) are very useful for identifying problem when they occur on multiple CPUs as otherwise it is entirely possible for two (or more) messages to show the same time stamp - making it difficult to know which one occurred first.

I agree, but most of the time this is not what I'm troubleshooting -- typically I'd like to see when the MD rebuild started or at what time I had a failure (e.g. my USB drive went offline). I hear what you're saying, but I'd like both options, especially since uptimes are completely relative.

Here's to them 'fixing' the problem in FC15 -- honestly, sometimes Linux changes for changes' sake are annoying.

Thanks, all!

[jpollard]

I don't think it is under the control of a distribution. The output appears to be generated by the kernel, as most of the output exists before even root is mounted. The kernel is spending it's time scanning and initializing controllers.

[vallimar]

It's the CONFIG_PRINTK_TIME option, which is under the Kernel Hacking section.
Fedora enables it by default.