printing boot probe messages

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 01:58:32PM -0500, Chuck Robey wrote:
>booting.  If I stick "-v" in /boot.config, then when the kernel probes, all
>the probes are verbose.  Stuff like my HDaudio card print incredibly
>verbose listings.  OK, that's what I will call here Print#1
>
>The other thing is what I can see if I see the ascii-graphical loader (the
>picture, in ascii-graphics, either of a BSDaemon, or of the letters
>"FreeBSD", and a list of about 9 options for booting.  If I select item #5,
>then I get a listing.  The listing is quite distinct from what I identify
>as Print#1, so I'll call this Print#2.  If I either hit return at that

There are no distinct names for what you call Print#1 and Print#2
because these outputs should be identical.  Within the kernel, the
verbosity is controlled by a boolean flag "bootverbose" - which is
visible via sysctl as "debug.bootverbose".

What differences are you seeing between the two outputs?
What is the content of your /boot.config and /boot/loader.conf (and
any other files you have changed in /boot)?

Can you please provide the output from "sysctl debug.boothowto" and "kenv"
in the the above two cases as well as a default boot.

I presume you aren't seeing any of this odd behaviour when you boot
from an install CD.  It would really help if you reverted back to a
stock GENERIC kernel, with no local mods in / or /boot and then
started re-applying your changes one at a time to see what has gone wrong.

>I'm beginning, right now, to wonder: I increased the dmesg-buffer to 64K, I
>wonder if maybe that might possibly cause the bug?  I know it shouldn't,
>but it wouldn't be the first time this week that I found weird behaviour in
>the kernel: if you set the number of vtys from the default 16 down to 8,
>that caused me to lose keyboard input to my X11.

None of this should happen either.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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