Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 10:13:18 -0700 From: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> To: Devin Teske <devin.teske@fisglobal.com> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org, 'Devin Teske' <dteske@vicor.com>, 'John Baldwin' <jhb@FreeBSD.org>, 'Andriy Gapon' <avg@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: revisiting tunables under Safe Mode menu option Message-ID: <26352740-D897-46CD-BD17-C61334826524@samsco.org> In-Reply-To: <06bb01ccf7cb$b255a200$1700e600$@fisglobal.com> References: <4F26CC5A.2070501@FreeBSD.org> <4F4C0600.2000903@FreeBSD.org> <3BA1B476-ED05-4E8E-8DFA-0B06EFB48867@samsco.org> <201202280846.08966.jhb@freebsd.org> <A8C72CB9-4C77-4697-8C28-63A2E10C557D@fisglobal.com> <4F4F35B9.5090308@FreeBSD.org> <06bb01ccf7cb$b255a200$1700e600$@fisglobal.com>
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On Mar 1, 2012, at 9:52 AM, Devin Teske wrote: > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Andriy Gapon [mailto:avg@FreeBSD.org] >> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2012 12:39 AM >> To: Devin Teske >> Cc: John Baldwin; freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org; Scott Long; Devin Teske >> Subject: Re: revisiting tunables under Safe Mode menu option >> >> on 01/03/2012 03:34 Devin Teske said the following: >>> >>> +1 on keeping the menu items loosely entwined (ACPI stands alone, but Safe >>> Mode knows about ACPI but only acts on it when being enabled). >> >> Can you explain why? >> +1 for having both menu items and each doing its own thing without any >> entanglement :-) >> > > First, I realize that this may sound entirely *dumb*, but here-goes: > > In transitioning from an old release (sans-menu; 4.11 for example) to a newer > release (with menu; 6.x for example), one of the first thing that is noticed is > "Safe Mode". > > I know that when I first saw this, I scratched my head and wondered what it did > and what it might be useful for. To this day, I still have never used it. > To be fair, I'm pretty sure that 'Safe Mode' was documented in one of the docbook manuals, though the FreeBSD project never, to my knowledge, had a "quick install/troubleshooting guide' that documented the loader menu. The name was inspired by Windows, but if you aren't familiar with that side of the world, then I can see how the name would have diminished meaning. So I understand where you're coming from. I'd like to turn the discussion away from ACPI specifically. What I'd like to see improved is two things: 1. There are a number of knobs that can be manipulated to help enable a non-booting system boot, which in turn gives a system administrator a fighting chance to figure out what's wrong. ACPI is (or was) one of these options, but there are several others, and up until your re-write of the menu system, they were opaque to the user. I'd like to explore the idea of having a sub-menu that exposes these knobs and allows them to be individually controlled, but still have an upper-level option that turns them all-on or all-off for ease of use. 2. There are a ton of kenv/TUNABLE knobs in any given kernel, and many of them are useful for sysadmins, even beyond just the 'safe mode' subset. I'd like to see a post-processor run on the kernel build that collects all of the kenv knobs in that kernel and puts them into a file that can be read by the boot menu system. The system then dynamically turns these into another sub-menu of knobs that can be manipulated. So, how hard would it be to have nested sub-menus? Would (1) be something feasible to do in the near term? Would (2) be feasible to do in the long term? Thanks, Scotthelp
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