Re: On the topic of noisy drivers...

Chris Evans (chris@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk)
Thu, 9 May 1996 00:23:33 +0100 (BST)


On Tue, 7 May 1996, David A Willmore wrote:

> I'll state this once more for a final bit of clarity. I have absolutely no
> qualms with printing out large amounts of debugging information on bootup.

Good. I like to have my Linux system reboot as infequently as possible (ie
a week is too short an uptime), but when it does it's nice to see all the
nice features of your various hardware being identified. What is annoying
you? If your logfiles get too big, process and erase the useless bits once
in a while.

> Since it's for debugging, it's for people with knowlege of the system. Since
> the knowlegable people are going to read it, it would be fine to compact it
> some or shorten some of the comments and spacing. Cryptic is fine. Taking a
> whole line to say that a SCSI device is a direct-access SCSI-1 CCS drive is
> rediculious. My final point is that some of us have limited options when it
> comes to scrollback. If the 'debugging' information scrolls of the screen
> before it can be read, it's not too useful for debugging, is it?

No. Unless you have the sense to run sysklogd. Or use the 'dmesg'
command. The buffer for kernel messages can be increased if you have >4k
of messages upon bootup (or is the ring bufer more than 4k in recent
kernels anyway?)

How are people supposed to see their hardware identified correctly if
messages are cryptic? Give a good reason why verbose messages are a bad
thing, and I might have sympathy!

Chris.

> Cheers,
> David
>