syslog-async project is a non-blocking syslog() replacement.
It is not widely known that the standard Unix syslog() library routine can block waiting for the syslog daemon, but it is generally true. On some systems, using a datagram socket for /dev/log avoids endless waits, but on Linux, even this does not work. Try typing
killall -STOP syslogd
into a root terminal on a non-critical box: Eventually, everything will stop.
This library provides a version of syslog() which never blocks: the code was originally written for dnsmasq, to fix a deadlock between syslod and dnsmasq where syslogd uses dnsmasq for DNS, and dnsmasq uses syslogd for logging. It should be generally useful for any daemon where it's more important that the daemon continue to function than that it continue to log.
The code has been tested on Linux 2.6, OpenBSD 4.0 and FreeBSD 6.0. It has been run with syslogd and syslog-ng. Note that it is not, currently, threadsafe.
The header file, syslog_async.h is extensively commented, and details how to use the library. It is, as far as possible, API compatible with the POSIX-standard syslog.
What's New in This Release:
Comments not found