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Linus Says No To Annoying Boot Messages
Pants Ripper writes: "In a victory for all Linux users, Linus Torvalds declared jihad
on annoying 'informational' kernel boot messages. I'm sure we'll all miss the inspirational 'spewtron driver 0.09 installed (C)2000 by Wardwick Extrusion' messages in our dmesgs." I've always thought those messages looked pretty interestingly verbose, but people want pretty boot-ups. And this Linus guy seems to know a lot about this "Lee-nuks," too.
FreeBSD has an option (although it is disabled by default.) to display a boot screen (similar to windows). IIRC, the boot screen can be dumped for the regular boot message by a flag to the loader, or by simply pressing escape during the boot (unless your error is: atkbd0: Error failed to initalize keyboard...
Really, what Linus seems to be annoyed at here are the excessivly verbose messages that some drivers like to print out (like I need to see the algorigthm benchmark each time I boot) that might drown out an important message by scrolling it off of the screen before you see it (although it should still be available through dmesg, just like the FreeBSD boot messages are still are even when you have the "graphical" boot.). The Linux boot sequence is getting a bit heavy on the pointless informational messages these days, so a bit of a pruning won't hurt too much.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Attention, We-Want-Linux-On-The-Desktop crowd: Support this and help out, it is a big step in the right direction. To a consumer, diagnostic messages are confusing and pointless. Admit that Apple did something right, for once (interpret that as you will): the Mac OS, up to and including X, will never show cryptic messages or break out of the GUI unless you give it a direct order to do so (launch Terminal or Console, hold down key sequences during boot) or a fatal error occurs. This is a good thing, it makes the experience seamless and friendly. Remember that consumers don't care about what drivers got loaded when (and isn't improving the drivers themselves a much more important goal than improving the error messages?) and similar arcane knowledge of the computer's internals, and saying "learn it anyway because it's good for you" will not win you any friends or customers.
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As a longtime UNIX admin who's used many UNIX systems, I think this is a good thing. I don't mind text printing on startup, but Linux prints so much ABSOLUTE USELESS CRAP to screen.
90% of them are ego-boosting messages by the authors of each chunk of the kernel. These are in particular what Linus seems to have an issue with.
I don't think boot messages should be completely gotten rid of, but they should be put on a rigorous diet. Let's look at the way other Unices do it. FreeBSD, for example, prints stuff, but it's terse and professional looking. Same with Solaris.
On Linux, the messages scroll so damn fast, especially on a speedy modern system, that you can't even read them. That's bad, folks. I can't even tell if the kernel is printing any error messages, because the credits messages scroll it so quick.
Yes, I don't mind a kernel component telling me it's there and the hardware's functional, but don't be so verbose about it!
This way, there would be several modes, selected by kernel parameters in the lilo.conf file or LILO prompt.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Linus: "Let's make it policy that we _never_ print out annoying messages that have no useful purpose for debugging or running the system, ok?"
Dont worry - Linus isnt going all Mac on us! As ever he is making more sense than your average hacker. I know what OS I'm running - and which kernel version, and even what modules im using. but yes some of this information is occasionly useful, and these are the bits that should be left. Maybe then they might not scroll off the screen so fast that we never read them anyhow.