On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 11:31:38AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
[...]
> Debian has already become rather difficult to debug. During the text boot
> process we have a change to the video mode which resets the scroll-back
> buffer
> and makes it difficult to read early messages that appear on the console.
> Now
> a serial console can make some of these things easier to debug but a recent
> hardware trend is towards making systems without a serial port.
>
> Is there any way of capturing the old text output from /dev/console at a
> later
> stage in the boot?
Apparently systemd does that. :-)
(Though I don't see how it can cover the initramfs automatically.)
> Also a recent hardware trend is to make systems without a PS/2 keyboard port.
>
> It seems that the USB modules don't get loaded from the initramfs if you
> configure it with modules=dep which makes the recovery option of
> init=/bin/bash incompatible with a small initramfs on a new system.
This sounds like a bug; please report it.
> But another issue is the creeping lack of support for systems without an
> initramfs. For example when we had upstart upstream refusing to accept a
> patch for SE Linux support that made it impossible to use an upstart based
> distribution with SE Linux on hardware which didn't support an initramfs.
>
> Finally one benefit of an event based booting system is that it won't become
> stuck if one daemon hangs. I've had problems in the past when one daemon
> didn't start up and that prevented other daemons from starting due to the
> sequential processing of init scripts.
I think our current dependency-based boot system deals with that
problem. Login on the local console could still be stalled though,
since getty is special (to sysvinit).
Ben.
--
Ben Hutchings
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
- Albert Camus
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