Re: Reducing noise in dmesg output

2009/9/3 Nick Hibma <nick_at_van-laarhoven.org>:
>> What is irrelevant is subjective...  I mean does the average user really
>> need to see anything in dmesg?  Please don't change agp_i810.c.  A
>> verbose boot is incredibly noisy and rarely needed for debugging
>> anything except the most deep rooted of issues.
>
> Please state arguments instead of this 'I think it is useful'. That's not
> going to cut it. If you feel strongly about the info that is being produced,
> an option would be to produce a (tested!) patch that combines more
> information on one line as a compromise.
>
> FreeBSD has historically been producing very limited output on dmesg. Linux
> is very noisy (ever noticed the copyright notices right in the middle of
> your list of PCI devices?). Even they have decided that they should hide
> this behind coloured 'ok/failed' texts in some distributions.

This seems like an important distinction - the information which needs
to be available with dmesg and the information best shown to the user
at startup are not necessarily the same. The hypothetical "average
user" probably wouldn't care if there were *no* kernel messages shown
on startup. The Xubuntu box I'm writing this from shows only GRUB
messages before the login prompt on tty1, and only service startup
messages on tty8 (not to suggest that FreeBSD ought to be more like
Ubuntu...).

IOW, why bother painting it at all? Plain galvanized steel is very
durable, and quite attractive when kept clean ;-)

-James Butler