Re: [PATCH] console: make blank timeout value a boot option

[Daniel Mack]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 01:17:40AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > That's already possible - there is an ioctl for that. It's just not
> > configurable at boot time, and that occured to be very annoying when
> > developing systems that won't fully boot up for >10mins. You have no way
> > to wake up the console then.
> 
> Oh.  Your changelog sucked :)
> 
> > Is there any concern why that shouldn't be a kernel option?
> 
> I suppose it makes sense.  You really have systems which take more than
> ten minutes to start running initscripts?  Poor you.

This happens during development only. Assume the system tries to mount
an NFS volume for its rootfs and fails due to a broken NIC driver; you
might be interessted in some debug output. Assume the kernel crashes
at boot time and you happen to miss that and come back to the machine
10 minutes later; you would still like to see the Oops. Or think about
situations where you forgot to add a userspace application to disable
the screen saver and you still want to see kernel messages and no input
device is attached to wake up the console. All possible scenarios where
this option would make sense.

I'm not saying it's the most important thing to have, but it's still
handy :)

> Please resend with a more complete description?

Attached. Better now?

Thanks,
Daniel