dmesg verbosity [was Re: AGP bogosities]

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

Hi!

> >>I'm fascinated that not a single person picked up on this problem
> >>whilst the agp code sat in -mm. Even if DRI isn't enabled,
> >>every box out there with AGP that uses the generic routines
> >>(which is a majority), should have barfed loudly when it hit
> >>this check during boot.  Does no-one read dmesg output any more ?
> >
> >Its way too long these days. Like "so long it overflows even enlarged
> >buffer". We should prune these messages down to "one line per hw
> >device or serious problems only".
> 
> especially if you turn on encryption options. I can understand that output 
> being useful for debugging, but there should be a way to not deal with it 
> in the normal case.

Perhaps we could have a rule like

"non-experimental driver may only print out one line per actual
device?"

(and perhaps: dmesg output for boot going okay should fit on one screen).

Or perhaps we should have warnings-like regression testing.

"New kernel 2.8.17 came: 3 errors, 135 warnings, 1890 lines of dmesg
junk".
								Pavel
-- 
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