I think "only print problems / exceptional conditions" is a reasonable use case. All UART output wastes time.

Is there a reason you want to see the banner but don't want to run at NOTICE? Maybe the better answer would be to add a new log level (e.g. LOG_IMPORTANT) between NOTICE and WARNING (or maybe between WARNING and ERROR)? Do you think there's a case where you would not want to see actual errors, but still want to see the banner? (Of course it's possible that on some platforms even LOG_ERROR spews uninteresting spam right now, but we should probably consider that a bug with the code that does so instead.)

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 2:05 PM, Martin Roth <gaumless@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Paul,
I agree that it seems reasonable to always print the banner to the console. My recommendation is that we don't even add it as an option. If there's a console set up, write the banner to it.

As I recall from Sage's version of coreboot, they made this same change, and printed it at level 0.

Martin

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Paul Menzel via coreboot <coreboot@coreboot.org> wrote:
Dear coreboot folks,

Playing a little with the log levels and QEMU, it turns out that there
are no coreboot messages below the log level *NOTICE*.

This is expected, but like with SeaBIOS, it’d be a good idea in my
opinion to at least output the “banner” of romstage and ramstage.

```
coreboot-4.5-1079-g613350897d Fri Feb 24 14:59:42 UTC 2017 romstage starting...

coreboot-4.5-1079-g613350897d Fri Feb 24 14:59:42 UTC 2017 ramstage starting...
```

This doesn’t map with the current log level description. Here are the
log levels with their help text from `src/console/Kconfig`.

> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_8
> bool "8: SPEW"
> help
> Way too many details.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_7
> bool "7: DEBUG"
> help
> Debug-level messages.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_6
> bool "6: INFO"
> help
> Informational messages.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_5
> bool "5: NOTICE"
> help
> Normal but significant conditions.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_4
> bool "4: WARNING"
> help
> Warning conditions.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_3
> bool "3: ERR"
> help
> Error conditions.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_2
> bool "2: CRIT"
> help
> Critical conditions.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_1
> bool "1: ALERT"
> help
> Action must be taken immediately.
> config DEFAULT_CONSOLE_LOGLEVEL_0
> bool "0: EMERG"
> help
> System is unusable.

In my opinion, it’d be a good idea to make an exception for the banner.

What do you think? Another solution would be, to make that a separate
Kconfig option like `CONSOLE_ALWAYS_PRINT_BANNER`, but I’d like to not
add other configuration options, if it’s not needed.

Thanks,

Paul
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