Re: Bug#502583: scary messages in dmesg

[Alexandre Lymberopoulos]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> A patch to suppress the WARN information will be in 2.6.28 when the
> user does something stupid (i.e., yank out a USB stick without
> unmounting the filesystem first).  This was done mainly to suppress
> the "scary message" in dmesg, which on distributions that support
> uploading such messages to http://www.kerneloops.org for analysis, was
> cluttering the reports.

I don't think removing these messages is a good idea. It's good even
for non-developer users to have information about what is happening on
their systems. At least to know that they (me in that case) did
something stupid.

> However, the patch does not make it any *safer* to uncerimoniously
> yank out a USB stick without unmounting it first.  This can still lead
> to data loss, unless you're *sure* that no process is writing to the
> stick and you issued the sync command, and you know enough time has
> passed so all of the data has been written to the USB stick.

Another reason to keep these messages. To hide information without
provinding a solution (I can see none here, i´'s impossible to prevent
anyone from doing stupid things) is not a good idea, sounds like the
philosophy of other operating systems...

> If you see "lost page write due to I/O error", then you will have lost
> data due to premature removal of the USB stick, and fundamentally
> *that* bug exists between the keyboard and the chair.

;-)

> Regards,
>
>                                                - Ted

Sincerley, Alexandre
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Alexandre Lymberopoulos - lymber@xxxxxxxxx
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