Messages in this thread | | | From | Dusty Mabe <> | Subject | multiplexing /dev/console to all console= entries | Date | Sun, 4 Nov 2018 20:45:34 -0500 |
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Hi Greg, Jiri,
I'd like to bring up a question about multiplexing /dev/console to all specified console= devices on the kernel command line rather than just the last entry. In my personal experience using linux systems and also in my experience dealing with users of various server images (Fedora Cloud, Fedora Atomic Host, Fedora Server, CentOS, RHEL, etc..) it is often hard to debug properly when something goes wrong because of a number of reasons:
- the user doesn't know the difference between a serial console and a VGA console - the user doesn't know what the settings were on the image they booted - the user doesn't know how to access the various console devices using the cloud environments they are on (i.e. they know of one but not the other) - in an attempt to share configs for disk image creation the creators add extra console= entries to cover various console devices and various architectures (see [1] where we are covering VGA/serial, hvc0, AMA0. etc)
I believe it would simplify debugging/troubleshooting with users if we were able to multiplex /dev/console to all console= entries. This conversation actually started as a PR to dracut [2] to get all of the systemd messages to be printed to all console= devices, but it was pointed out there [3] that rather than change the the settings in dracut it would be better to attempt to change the kernel behavior.
If a patch were submitted to enable this type of behavior would such a patch be acceptable? Maybe it could be a compile time option and also have a kernel arg option to enable/disable it.
Note: I apologize if this functionality already exists and I missed it somehow.
Note: I grabbed info from [4] about who to contact for tty subsystem questions. I apologize in advance if you are the wrong people to contact.
Thanks! Dusty
[1] https://pagure.io/fedora-kickstarts/blob/ee84a1650b8188cbd00d54a688838207c34906f4/f/fedora-atomic.ks#_36 [2] https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/pull/445 [3] https://github.com/dracutdevs/dracut/pull/445#issuecomment-424755057 [4] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/82aa4671516a3203261c835e98c3eecab10c994d/MAINTAINERS#L15149-L15151
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