Re:Show HN: How did I live without Pipe Watch?
by kazinator on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @07:12PM
(#31254794)
As an embedded developer I have different view. Linux is everywhere. I've been working within nothing but embedded Linux constantly since 2005.
I regularly install debugging tools onto target devices (strace, tcpdump, ...) even though those don't go into a production image.
Currently, I'm using pw on an embedded system, for capturing detailed traces from an application. It's very useful because it decouples the rate of the traces from the serial port, while still letting me get the info I need out of it.
The stripped executable is tiny: 20 kilobytes. It's so small I'm stashing it in a configuration flash partition which survives re-flashes of the kernel and filesystem, so I have the utility there no matter which image I load onto the target.
I never suggested that was the case. I just don’t consider then in scope for this topic.
I have managed numerous such devices over my career. In fact most of my home networking gear would fall into that category of “produces logs and SSH but not a server” but none of which runs anything UNIX-like (so you couldn’t install this tool even if you wanted to). However they do support a bunch of different tooling for pushing logs and metrics over the network. Which then brings me back to my earlier point about log collection.
Also if we take your example of embedded devices with low memory and storage, then installing additional utilities like this one when you can already do the same thing (albeit less conveniently) with busybox probably isn’t a good idea. So they’d be out of scope for this thread too.
I’m not going to say that there’s no such thing as a non-server platform that produces logs that this tool would be useful for (I don’t believe in absolutes!) however it is reasonable to assume that servers and desktops, ie more classical computing devices, are a vastly larger demographic for this tool. Hence why I focused my examples around that.