Date: Sat, 29 Apr 1995 04:21:30 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: What I'd *really like* for 2.0.5 Message-ID: <13702.799154490@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 28 Apr 1995 23:50:47 PDT." <199504290650.XAA08734@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>
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> The ``not found'' messages issue was debated and decided shortly after it > was implemented. The major reason for keeping it around is that you > know the kernel looked for the device, you know at what address it tried I'm well aware of why it was decided to keep it, having been there during the debates, but this doesn't mean that I agreed with the logic then or now. > I do mind to some extent if you go on a ``message reform rampage'' with > out a clear statement of just what it is you are going to do. Fair enough: 1. Eliminate all but the "found" messages, allowing you to make kernels with additional device support that aren't as chatty as the ones now. When you boot a generic kernel on a given machine, it should show you what it finds there and nothing more. If you need more information about what's being searched for, what's being found and what's not being found, then I think that's a special circumstance and you should boot with -v. Nate has argued that "it's valuable to know what the kernel didn't find" and I strongly disagree. It's valuable to know this WHEN YOU'RE HAVING TROUBLE AND IT'S NOT FINDING STUFF YOU *WANT* IT TO FIND, and for every other case it's just NOISE. I would hope that as FreeBSD's device support gets better, and it's already fairly good (for a PC based UN*X, anyway), we'd have less and less need to have people do anything special; it should just work out of the box! In the exceptional cases where it doesn't, the user can boot with -v. It's also foolish to debate this on the merits (or lack thereof) of our documentation. I can readily suggest a number of truly loathsome hacks that would easily compensate for some aspect of our system being poorly documented, but it wouldn't make them right or desirable. 2. Carefully examine each and every probe message and attempt to regularize it to some standard form, e.g.: <devname><unit#>: <description>, port <port>, irq <irq>, drq <drq>, ioaddr <ioaddr>, iosize <iosize> [optional attributes] on <bus>. [<devname><unit#>: [optional information]] The goal being to get principle probe messages on one line again and to display the various parameters using the SAME naming conventions used in userconfig to minimize confusion. Some examples: sc0: Syscons Console Driver, port 0x60-0x6f, irq 1 [VGA color] on ISA. sc0: [16 virtual consoles] ed0: General Ethernet Driver, port 0x280-0x29f, irq 15, ioaddr 0xd8000, iosize 16384 on ISA. ed0: [address 00:00:c0:58:99:72, type SMC8416C/SMC8416BT (16 bit)] sio0: Serial IO Driver, port 0x3f8-0x3ff, irq 4 [type 16550A] on ISA. fdc0: Floppy Controller, port 0x3f0-0x3f7, irq 6, drq 2, [NEC 72065B] on ISA. fd0: on fdc0, [1.44MB 3.5in]. This is just off the top of my head, and already I don't like it, but it's at least orthogonal. The biggest headache are attached devices like fd0 here. I'm not sure how best to deal with them. Maybe something like "<dev><unit#>: on <controller>, [optional attributes]". Assuming that the syntax can be agreed upon, is that enough detail to go on? I'd prefer not to debate this for a long time or we will end up doing what we usually end up doing at the end of long debates: Nothing. Jordan
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