From owner-freebsd-current  Wed Nov 22 13:22:54 2000
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To: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: RFC: /dev/console -> /var/log/messages idea/patch 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 22 Nov 2000 15:12:22 CST."
             <20001122151221.A29341@dan.emsphone.com> 
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 22:22:39 +0100
Message-ID: <1470.974928159@critter>
From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
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In message <20001122151221.A29341@dan.emsphone.com>, Dan Nelson writes:
>In the last episode (Nov 22), Poul-Henning Kamp said:
>> The attached patch is a "proof-of-concept" on which I would like to
>> get some comments:
>> 
>> It bugs me big time that the output from /etc/rc and all other output
>> to /dev/console is volatile and lost once it scrolls of your console.
>
>SCO logs its startup by simply piping the output of its rc scripts
>through "2>&1 | tee -a /usr/adm/rc#.log".  We could do something
>similar by wrapping everything after the "mount -a -t nonfs" command on
>like 174 with

I've tried stuff like that and I didn't particularly like the result,
for one thing many programs (or maybe it was tee(1) itself) changed
buffering because of the pipe, which meant that the partial lines
like 
	"starting standard daemons: inetd cron sendmail sshd."

would only arrive on the real console when the final \n arrived.

Another particular thing I remember was that some syslog-challenged 
daemons whine on /dev/console long after /etc/rc has finished.

Dump(8) will do something similar if you don't flip the tapes in
finite time.

So while it goes a long way, I think we need to provide more coverage
of "/dev/console" as a concept.

Poul-Henning

PS: As I said, a decently functional console subsystem would be a nice 
thing.  At the very least I would want to be able to specify:
	console output to /dev/ttyd0, /dev/ttyv0 and /var/log/console
	console input from /dev/ttyd0 or /dev/ttyv0.
and preferably with a scrollback buffer too.  Network consoles would
be nice as well.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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