Fabiano and I were wondering about the meaning of "enable_debug" in the configuration file.

Right now, the surrounding comments are:

[runtime] # If enabled, the runtime will log additional debug messages to the # system log # (default: disabled) #enable_debug = true

The comment seems to imply that if you set `enable_debug`, then you get additional debug messages. The question is how this is supposed to interact with the `debug` command-line option.

The two possible interpretations are:

- This activates debug when set, irrespective of the command line option. In other words, log if debug || enable_debug

- This enables debug when the command line is also set. In other words, log if debug && enable_debug

According to experiments Fabiano made, it looks like Kata is logging at "warn" level when the command line option is not given, which means lower-level logs are not seen. This seems to indicate that the current interpretation is the second one, but this is not exactly the way I personally read the comment in the configuration file.

If the intend is indeed that "enable_debug" is an administrative gate, then maybe we also need a "debug" option in the configuration file. Or maybe this is just to be treated as a bug, with the risk that it would change default behavior for systems that have enable_debug in production.

Thoughts? IIUC the `enable_debug` config option mainly controls kata component

On 2021/6/2 17:49, Christophe de Dinechin wrote: processes log level. E.g., hypervisor `enable_debug` means that vmm should run in debug mode, and agent `debug_debug` means that kata-agent runs in debug log level. The shimv2 process log level is controlled by the debug command line option OTOH. Cheers, Tao -- Into something rich and strange.