Re: fbcon: remove soft scrollback code (missing Doc. patch)

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Jan 08 2021 - 18:12:51 EST


On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 11:13 AM Phillip Susi <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Could we pause this madness? Scrollback is still useful. I needed it
> > today... it was too small, so command results I was looking for
> > already scrolled away, but... life will be really painful with 0
> > scrollback.
>
> > You'll need it, too... as soon as you get oops and will want to see
> > errors just prior to that oops.
>
> > If it means I get to maintain it... I'm not happy about it but that's
> > better than no scrollback.
>
> Amen! What self respecting admin installs a gui on servers? What do we
> have to do to get this back in? What was so buggy with this code that
> it needed to be removed? Why was it such a burden to just leave it be?

It really was buggy, with security implications. And we have no maintainers.

So the scroll-back code can't come back until we have a maintainer and
a cleaner and simpler implementation.

And no, maintaining it really doesn't mean "just get it back to the
old broken state".

So far I haven't actually seen any patches, which means that it's not
coming back.

The good news? If you have an actual text VGA console, that should
still work just fine.

Linus