[ On Tuesday, October 12, 2004 at 22:18:06 (+0200), Hauke Fath wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Cosmetic changes to rc.d scripts
>
> I've always liked the terseness of the NetBSD bootlog over what I see on
> Linuxes. With fast machines and a 24x80 text console, there is only so much
> time to read.

You're not supposed to even try to read the kernel boot messages while
they are being written to the screen.

It's only written to the screen so that if it stops unexpectedly you can
see the last few lines of whatever was written.

If you want to see the whole boot log then you can find it in
/var/run/dmesg.boot or you can use "dmesg" interactively with whatever
pager you wish.

(of course it is very nice if the console terminal emulator supports
scroll-back so that if it's still partly alive, e.g. when the system
drops into DDB during boot, you can still scroll back and see the whole
boot log interactively)

Or you can hook your system up to a printing console -- but remember
that modern computers are much much faster than any line printer these
days and the slowness of the console will slow down the whole system.
(unless someone wants to change things to split off a kernel thread for
writing to slow consoles :-)


> And I probably won't enjoy picking the only important (for
> me) information 'inetd' from what comment string NetBSD likes to print this
> month.

As for reading the output of /etc/rc, well it would be very nice if that
were all logged too, though ideally what's wrriten to /dev/console from
userland should be logged separately from what the kernel writes.

(and of course if the console terminal emulator supports scroll-back
then you can still pause and re-read the /etc/rc output too)

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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