Quiet the kernel during boot?

Well, after having a short respite from FreeBSD by checking out Slackware, I've decided to come back to this amazing UNIX system. I have, however, run into a couple of niggles.


FreeBSD displays a whole bunch of text from the kernel when it boots. Linux does it too, and when I used Linux, I would always append "quiet" to my lilo or grub config file to speed up the boot process and make it a little less verbose. How do I do this with /boot/loader.conf (or whatever I need to use)? I'm currently not using a bootloader yet, although I do have a Vista partition and I'm trying to think of the best bootloader to install to access both FreeBSD and Vista.

Thanks,
Allamgir

A quick update: I found the option verbose_loading="NO" in the man page for loader.conf, but that didn't really seem to do much of anything. I still get the white text messages about all the modules, etc.

You could try boot_mute.

See loader(8).

Or use a splash screen.

Well that didn't really improve boot time at all, but it did hide the kernel messages. Mainly what annoys me are those from the wpi driver. It always holds back the boot process by waiting until I connect to the Internet before completing booting, and if I set verbose_loading, it pushes those messages after the login prompt, interfering with the part that says login:. It's extremely annoying

This boot_mute option leaves me at the loader screen (with the ASCII bubble letters) for too long; it looks like it's frozen. I wonder if I could have a text-based splash screen...

I do like watching the boot messages, though, just not those horrible wpi ones that come up. Is there any way to simply suppress those?

Allamgir said:

Mainly what annoys me are those from the wpi driver. It always holds back the boot process by waiting until I connect to the Internet before completing booting

Click to expand...

you can avoid waiting for the connection adding this to /etc/rc.conf:


you can get some problems with services which require internet, though

Aww . It didn't work. It still pauses for a good minute or so right at [Configuring syscons: blanktime screensaver. This is right after my wireless driver stuff shows up, so I figured the network must be holding it back. What's happening here and how can I fix it?

Wireless NICs take a while to configure, establish a connection, and become ready. There's really nothing you can do to speed things up.

To see what I mean, comment out the ifconfig_wpi/ifconfig_wlan line(s) on rc.conf. Then reboot. Things should be nice and quick. Login, uncomment the line(s) in rc.conf. Then run [cmd=""]/etc/rc.d/netif restart[/cmd] as root. You'll see the long wait and pauses here.

I know this is a years-old thread, but I wanted to add a simple but non-obvious answer: Enable the serial console. All your output until you hit a login prompt will go there.