Re: Hiding Kernel Messages

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd@snew.com>]

Quoting Jon Coller (jon.coller@shaw.ca):
> I'm trying to prevent any messages from being displayed to the terminal on
> boot, simply displaying a login prompt when ready. If any one knows how to
> hide kernel and boot mesasges it would be great.

I'm responding to the top...

On trading floors, we had Suns and we had some NeXTs.
Both ran Unix (SunOS, and Mac "OS X minus 4" :)

The Suns booted up and spewed "all these error messages" according
to one of our guys.

The NeXT booted up and showed a pretty spinning disk.
Sometimes, it showed it for 10 minutes.  Hmmm, what to do?

Ah, hit <CONTROL>-|  and you see the console.

MacOS X is similar (Command-V or something on power up).


It's pretty nice.  Mom isn't scared by dmesg messages, but I
can see what's up when it hangs.


The big advantage is that NeXT and Macs have real boot PROMs.
And support something like 4 video cards.  They also own the
hardware.


OpenBSD (any multiplatform OS, really) can't control that.

Reading my Design & Implementation of 4.4BSD, we also see
that the hardware discovery phase part of the kernel is
where many of the messages come from.  That's before any
disk is mounted, before we could read any config file.

Perhaps something burned into the boot command, but we also
don't know about the keyboard (where NeXT/Mac does at the ROM).
So how to read the "Stop showing the picture and give me
the real kernel output" command?

It's a hard question and when solved, nice.  But it's gotta
be a REALLY low to negative priority with an OS that lives
on so much odd hardware (Intel is odd enough all on its own).