Reading the following google paper on memory errors:
http://www.google.com/research/pubs/pub35162.html
I suppose they weren't really reporting memory errors with printk.
Because of this:
"The scale of the system and the data being collected make the
analysis non-trivial. Each one of many ten-thousands of machines in
the fleet logs every ten minutes hundreds of parameters, adding up to
many TBytes."
This would add up to gigabytes of generated data, for each machine, in
some minutes. It seems to me that printk isn't really suited to report
large amounts of raw data.
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