Re: [PATCH] printk: Make CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_QUIET configurable

Petr Mladek
2018-06-20T11:03:39Z

On Tue 2018-06-19 13:57:26, Hans de Goede wrote:
> The goal of passing the "quiet" option to the kernel is for the kernel
> to be quiet unless something really is wrong.
>
> Sofar passing quiet has been (mostly) equivalent to passing
> loglevel=4 on the kernel commandline. Which means to show any messages
> with a level of KERN_ERR or higher severity on the console.
>
> In practice this often does not result in a quiet boot though, since
> there are many false-positive or otherwise harmless error messages printed,
> defeating the purpose of the quiet option. Esp. the ACPICA code is really
> bad wrt this, but there are plenty of others too.

I see your pain. But this sounds like a workaround for a broken code.
This change might just encourage people to create even more mess.

> This commit makes CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_QUIET configurable.
>
> This for example will allow distros which want quiet to really mean quiet
> to set CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_QUIET so that only messages with a higher severity
> then KERN_ERR (CRIT, ALERT, EMERG) get printed, avoiding an endless game
> of whack-a-mole silencing harmless error messages.

I find it a bit confusing that "quiet" would mean something different
on different systems.

Why did not you use loglevel=<whatever_you_need> instead of "quiet"?

Alternative solution would be to add "silent" or so to calm down
everything. But I am afraid that any change in this area would
just create a mess similar to grep -s and -q options.

Best Regards,
Petr

PS: I will not block it if Steven and Sergey are fine with this. But
I want to be sure that they considered the above views. It looked like
a no-brainer to me at the beginning. I even pushed this to printk.git.
But the pushing gave me some more time to think about it...