Re: On the topic of noisy drivers...

Justin T. Gibbs (gibbs@freefall.freebsd.org)
Thu, 02 May 1996 07:38:25 -0700

>On 30 Apr 96 at 14:53, David A Willmore wrote:
>
>> On Apr 29, 11:12pm, Mike McLagan wrote:
>> > Is there *ANY* reason that the AIC77x0 driver needs to spew it's life's
>> > story onto the console during bootup? Seems to me that 99% of what it spi
>ts
>> > out is extraneous!
>> >
>> > Maybe gagging it for 2.0 would be a good idea?
>>
>> I have to agree here. The number of lines that scroll by when my six disk S
>CSI
>> system boots is silly. Do I really need six lines to tell me that my disks
>all
>> use 512 byte hardware sectors? Partition information is line this, too. Ma
>ybe
>> I just have too many drives....
>
>I think the Buslogic driver even beats the aic7xxx in number of
>messages...

My opinion on this is that drivers should only be verbose if you ask them
to be. Under FreeBSD, everything is very quiet unless you specify the
"-v" boot flag. So, the FreeBSD aic7xxx driver spits out two lines per
adapter, and the SCSI system spits out two lines per device by default:

ahc0: <Adaptec 274X SCSI host adapter> at 0x1c00-0x1cff irq 11 on eisa0 slot 1
ahc0: aic7770 <= Rev C, Twin Channel, A SCSI Id=7, B SCSI Id=7, 4 SCBs
(ahc0:0:0): "QUANTUM PD1225S 3110" type 0 fixed SCSI 2
sd0(ahc0:0:0): Direct-Access 1169MB (2395980 512 byte sectors)

Dan Eischen mentioned something about using different syslog levels to
get this type of effect under Linux.

>> Cheers,
>> David
>
>Ulrich

--
Justin T. Gibbs
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