Logs are primarily consumed in either an interactive (“online”) context with a live device, or in an “offline” context with logs collected from past execution of a device.
Because there are two buffers which store logs, there are two main ways to view them when you have a live device. For more information about where logs are stored on-device, see Concepts: Storage.
During development, running fx log
is a good default to see all logs. This script connects to the target device with SSH and runs the log_listener
program, printing every message from the system log. This includes those forwarded from the klog.
log_listener
receives logs through the fuchsia.logger.Log
and fuchsia.logger.LogListenerSafe
protocols.
log_listener
emits lines in this format by default:
[seconds.nanos][pid][tid][tags] LEVEL: message
The timestamp is from the monotonic clock by default.
If the message “something happened” is written at WARN level by my-component.cmx from process=1902 and thread=1904 at time=278.14, the default output would be:
[278.14][1902][1904][my-component.cmx] WARN: something happened
With a running device available, run fx log -h
to see the options for modifying the output format.
fx test
Under the hood, fx test
calls run-test-component
which collects isolated stdout
, stderr
, and LogSink
connections from test components, printing the output inline and preventing them showing up in the global log buffers.
For tests that are not yet components no interception of logs is performed.
The klog is printed over the kernel console and serial.
It‘s also forwarded over UDP by netsvc, which is what’s printed when you run fx klog
. Running fx klog
in a background terminal can be a good way to capture logs if your SSH session fails, or as a backup if there are other issues with running fx log
.
The kernel log's dumper emits lines in the format:
[timestamp] pid:tid> message
The timestamp is from the monotonic clock. It is formatted with 5 digits (leading zeroes) for seconds and three digits for milliseconds (trailing zeroes).
Process and thread koids are written with 5 digits each (leading zeroes).
If the message “something happened” is written from process=1902 and thread=1904 at time=278.14, the resulting output would be:
[00278.140] 01902:01904> something happened
When running tests, a Swarming bot invokes botanist which collects several output streams to be presented in the web UI. The stdout
& stderr
of botanist are what's presented in the “swarming task UI”.
For individual test executables botanist invokes testrunner and collects that output separately. It is this output that can be seen after a failing test, with a link named stdio
. Most tests that testrunner invokes run run-test-component
via SSH to the target device. This collects the stdout, stderr, and logs from the test environment and prints them inline.
Botanist runs log_listener
on the target device and saves that output to syslog.txt. This is comparable to running fx log
at a development machine.
This log includes the stdout and stderr of the command run by the Swarming task. Normally this includes the following notable items, all interleaved:
fx klog
)stdout
and stderr
of the tests run by testrunnerThis aggregate log is run through the equivalent of fx symbolize
before upload.