[PATCH] Fancy rc startup (revisited)

[Steve Rikli]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 09:40:30PM -0500, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (May 12), Robert Watson said:
> >  Call me old-fashioned, but I actually preferred the much more
> >  abbreviated rc output from before rc.d even. :-) We're not going
> >  back to hardware devices where all the probed devices add up to
> >  fewer than 25 lines, I'm sure, but when daemons generated 8-12
> >  characters without a carriage return each, there was a good chance
> >  you could still see the end of the kernel messages by the time you
> >  got to login:, and I miss that.  I don't object to optional more
> >  complex output as long as that complexity is hidden away neatly
> >  somewhere in rc.subr, and isn't on by default as shipped.  I'd love
> >  it if someone could restore the even shorter output we had before.
> 
> Taken to an extreme, you have Solaris 10, where you get the kernel's
> copyright message, smf kicks off all the startup scripts in parallel
> (subject to dependency rules) in the background, their output goes into
> individual logfiles, and all you see is the login: prompt at the
> console :)

Right.  And near as I can tell, no easy way to control that behavior
without passing args to the kernel at boottime.  I think.  Which can
be a bother e.g. when you're trying to figure out what the thing is
actually doing (or trying to do), and you can't remember.  :)

I can appreciate the above commentary about brevity, but in the absence
of "the one true boot message behavior", the ability to set e.g.

boot_verbose=[YES|NO|MEDIUM]

or similar notion in rc.conf might be good, if implement'able.

cheers,
sr.