A sort of plan for consoles in FreeBSD

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2006-May-27 22:12:38 -0700, Julian Elischer wrote:
>Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>We have four concepts of "console" in FreeBSD:
>>
>>1. Whatever boot0/boot1/boot2/loader uses
>>    Accessed from/via native boot/firmware environment
>
>#1 is sort of independent as it stops being used at the moment FreeBSd 
>starts.

Last time I checked, the copyright notice and some of the early kernel
probe output came via the native firmware (at least on some
architectures).  There's a bit of a Catch-22 because the kernel wants
to report output before it's got far enough through the device probe
sequence to be able to talk to the hardware making up the console.

>>4. The /dev/console device in multi-user mode.
>>    Emergency output device for critical messages.
>
>but, emergency messages from where? You've coverred the ones I care about 
>above.

syslog(3) LOG_CONS immediately comes to mind.  A quick check of the
source shows that ps(1), init(8), rpc.ypxfrd(8), bits of the lp
subsystem as well as thread library's initialisation code can also
write to /dev/console.

I thought dump(8) did but it doesn't appear to any longer.

-- 
Peter Jeremy