[coreboot] [RFC] Always include coreboot banner in console independent of log level

[Martin Roth]

My argument is that if nothing at all is shown, its difficult to know if
that's because nothing needs to be shown, or because the console is busted.

Maybe we break break up the banner, and don't print both romstage and
ramstage banners, but just the romstage banner.  I'd say that just printing
the coreboot version should be sufficient, especially since the build date
is based on the commit id:

So at loglevel 0, we get:
  coreboot-4.5-1079-g613350897d

At loglevel 5 (or whatever) we get the additional text:
   coreboot-4.5-1079-g613350897d Fri Feb 24 14:59:42 UTC 2017 romstage
starting...



On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 4:33 PM, Julius Werner <jwerner at chromium.org> wrote:

> 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 at 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 at 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
>>> --
>>> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
>>> https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> coreboot mailing list: coreboot at coreboot.org
>> https://www.coreboot.org/mailman/listinfo/coreboot
>>
>
>
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