Re: Bug#502583: scary messages in dmesg

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:

A patch to suppress the WARN information will be in 2.6.28 when the
user does something stupid (i.e., yank out a USB stick without
unmounting the filesystem first). This was done mainly to suppress
the "scary message" in dmesg, which on distributions that support
uploading such messages to http://www.kerneloops.org for analysis, was
cluttering the reports.

I don't think removing these messages is a good idea. It's good even
for non-developer users to have information about what is happening on
their systems. At least to know that they (me in that case) did
something stupid.

However, the patch does not make it any *safer* to uncerimoniously
yank out a USB stick without unmounting it first. This can still lead
to data loss, unless you're *sure* that no process is writing to the
stick and you issued the sync command, and you know enough time has
passed so all of the data has been written to the USB stick.

Another reason to keep these messages. To hide information without
provinding a solution (I can see none here, i´'s impossible to prevent
anyone from doing stupid things) is not a good idea, sounds like the
philosophy of other operating systems...

If you see "lost page write due to I/O error", then you will have lost
data due to premature removal of the USB stick, and fundamentally
*that* bug exists between the keyboard and the chair.

;-)

Regards,

- Ted

Sincerley, Alexandre
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Alexandre Lymberopoulos - lymber@xxxxxxxxx
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