Re: PCIVERBOSE and kern/38579

[Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>]

On 05-May-2008 Bill Stouder-Studenmund wrote:
> I like the idea of teaching userland how to understand locators. If we do 
> that, would it be sufficient for you if we had a script you feed the dmesg 
> to and it adds the full strings to it?

Hardly.  Imagine if every PR came in to your email box rot13.  There is a handy
script to convert it, but you can't read it until you do.  Thats not to say
such a script would be useless. It just doesn't make my life easier.  :)

>> Additionally, as a user, I like to see that stuff come across the screen
>> when
>> booting.  I know instantly if something is not right.
> 
> Hmmm.... Ok, running this into the ground, another option might be to 
> support custom lists. When you make a custom kernel, you can add a subset 
> of the list (say all the stuff that showed up in dmesg last boot). So all 
> the things you have in your system have nice names, and other stuff 
> doesn't. If things start showing up cryptic, you know something changed..

This sorta solves the problem of the user who likes to see dmesg.  Though it
does add an extra step in.

The problem with this though, is that if someone buys bizzaro machine X on
ebay, downloads ofppc, and boots it to send me the dmesg, there is no way in
advance that I could possibly know what is in that machine.

The IBM ports (ofppc/prep/rs6000) are rather unique in that each machine is an
independant porting effort for me.  Furthermore, most of this is done remotely,
either by me shipping kernels through email, or with remote serial consoles. 
The *VERBOSE options make my life a little easier.

If you want to do this to i386, I won't stop you or object, but I do object to
pulling them from the kernel sources entirely.

---
Tim Rightnour <root%garbled.net@localhost>
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS http://www.netbsd.org/
Genecys: Open Source 3D MMORPG: http://www.genecys.org/