Season’s greetings, everyone! It’s time for yet-another-edition of Things In IT That Bug Me. Today’s victim is: overly chatty Linux dmesgs. This may seem a bit frivolous of a complaint. However, I feel that since the dmesg is one of the first things one seems when one boots an operating system, having a ridiculously chatty and verbose bootup sequence makes Linux look like it’s patched together with no overarching control. Basically, I don’t think 90% of end-users care about seeing:
- Memory address space allocation dumps
- The compiler used to create the kernel
- RCS ID strings, version numbers, names and companies of the authors of various pieces
- Debugging information only useful to the developers of a particular piece.
I’m a big fan of the way the BSD kernel messages are
structured. With a few exceptions, all one really needs to know when
the OS is booting up is what devices were detected. And that’s all.
Just have a look at the following bootup sequence from my work machine. Do you really think an end-user cares, for example, that "Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4" is "[b]ased upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039" or that the USB UHCI driver was committed on October 11 at 3:36 p.m. with revision 1.275, or that Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au) wrote the mtrr driver? I highly doubt someone is going to e-mail Richard Gooch directly based on the contents of the dmesg, but this shows up on every Linux dmesg.
The following dmesg is nearly 140 lines long. Booting FreeBSD on the same machine yields a dmesg that’s around 80 lines. It’s time that Linux got its act together and cleaned up the messy dmesg, or the problem will continue to balloon out of control.
My dmesg:
Linux version 2.4.20-20.9.XFS1.3.1 (root@naboo.americas.sgi.com) (gcc version 3.2.2 20030222 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.2-5)) #1 Sat Oct 11 15:23:43 CDT 2003
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 00000000000a0000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000003ff77000 (usable)
BIOS-e820: 000000003ff77000 - 000000003ff79000 (ACPI NVS)
BIOS-e820: 000000003ff79000 - 0000000040000000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fec00000 - 00000000fec10000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000fee00000 - 00000000fee10000 (reserved)
BIOS-e820: 00000000ffb00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
127MB HIGHMEM available.
896MB LOWMEM available.
On node 0 totalpages: 262007
zone(0): 4096 pages.
zone(1): 225280 pages.
zone(2): 32631 pages.
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=2.4.20-20.9.XFS ro BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-20.9.XFS1.3.1 hdd=ide-scsi root=LABEL=/
ide_setup: hdd=ide-scsi
Initializing CPU#0
Detected 1993.983 MHz processor.
Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
Calibrating delay loop... 3971.48 BogoMIPS
Memory: 1026556k/1048028k available (1407k kernel code, 17896k reserved, 1072k data, 136k init, 130524k highmem)
kdb version 4.3 by Keith Owens, Scott Lurndal. Copyright SGI, All Rights Reserved
Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
Inode cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
Mount cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
Buffer-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
Page-cache hash table entries: 262144 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache: 8K
CPU: L2 cache: 512K
Intel machine check architecture supported.
Intel machine check reporting enabled on CPU#0.
CPU: After generic, caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU: Common caps: bfebfbff 00000000 00000000 00000000
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz stepping 07
Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
mtrr: detected mtrr type: Intel
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfbe5e, last bus=2
PCI: Using configuration type 1
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
Transparent bridge - Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA/DB PCI Bridge
PCI: Using IRQ router PIIX [8086/2440] at 00:1f.0
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.4
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
Initializing RT netlink socket
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver version 1.16)
Starting kswapd
allocated 32 pages and 32 bhs reserved for the highmem bounces
VFS: Disk quotas vdquot_6.5.1
pty: 2048 Unix98 ptys configured
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with MANY_PORTS MULTIPORT SHARE_IRQ SERIAL_PCI ISAPNP enabled
ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
Real Time Clock Driver v1.10e
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
NET4: Frame Diverter 0.46
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00beta3-.2.4
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ICH2: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:1f.1
ICH2: chipset revision 4
ICH2: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
hda: ST340016A, ATA DISK drive
blk: queue c03ed4e0, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hdc: Lite-On LTN486S 48x Max, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: HL-DT-ST GCE-8481B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=4865/255/63, UDMA(100)
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
md: md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
IP: routing cache hash table of 8192 buckets, 64Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 262144 bind 65536)
Linux IP multicast router 0.06 plus PIM-SM
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0/SMP for Linux NET4.0.
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 394k freed
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
SGI XFS 1.3.1 with ACLs, no debug enabled
SGI XFS Quota Management subsystem
XFS mounting filesystem ide0(3,2)
Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: ide0(3,2)
Freeing unused kernel memory: 136k freed
usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs
usb.c: registered new driver hub
usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.275 $ time 15:36:30 Oct 11 2003
usb-uhci.c: High bandwidth mode enabled
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:1f.2
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.2 to 64
usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xff80, IRQ 11
usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 2 ports detected
PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:1f.4
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1f.4 to 64
usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xff60, IRQ 9
usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports
usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2
hub.c: USB hub found
hub.c: 2 ports detected
usb-uhci.c: v1.275:USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver
usb.c: registered new driver hiddev
usb.c: registered new driver hid
hid-core.c: v1.8.1 Andreas Gal, Vojtech Pavlik
hid-core.c: USB HID support drivers
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
hub.c: new USB device 00:1f.2-1, assigned address 2
Adding Swap: 1044216k swap-space (priority -1)
input0: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB Optical Mouse] on usb1:2.0
XFS mounting filesystem ide0(3,1)
Ending clean XFS mount for filesystem: ide0(3,1)
hdc: attached ide-cdrom driver.
hdc: ATAPI 48X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache, UDMA(33)
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
hdd: attached ide-scsi driver.
scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
Vendor: HL-DT-ST Model: CD-RW GCE-8481B Rev: C102
Type: CD-ROM
When I get a chance, I’ll capture a FreeBSD dmesg on this same box and you can see how much cleaner it is.