Replacing/enhancing kernel printf()

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <FED4C690-E501-4F54-93AE-F5B75929BBA6 at mac.com>, Marcel Moolenaar wri
tes:

>>> Are you referring to:
>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-arch/2006-May/ 
>>> 005224.html
>
>Let's define "the low-level console" as nothing more than a
>switchboard.

The reason I didn't go that route, is that the "streams"
have vastly different sematics, some are even bidirectional.

At the very least you need to think carefully about all of
the four distinct phases:

	Before the kernel runs
	Kernel until /sbin/init
	/sbin/init and single user mode
	Multiuser mode.

Lumping them all together is what we have today, which we
both recognize as not the way to go.

I fully agree that printf(9) is an unholy tangle of all sorts
of messages and that it should be possible to sort them,
but that is only a small part of the console puzzle, and
fixing that should not make the current tangle any worse.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.