> it flies past the screen too fast. So either way it's dmesg or dmidecode...
You won't believe how finicky server GPUs can be. One of our servers can update the screen so slow during booting, not only you can read everything line by line, that 30 second boot takes more than 2 minutes because of it.
Though I suppose maybe some graphics-mode consoles can still be slow. I'm not sure if there's much point using them, though, if there is never a graphical interface running.
IPMI serial console has its own buffer, it doesn't usually do flow control all the way to the other side.
I have seen serial console slow things down when configured for flow control on the wrong port though. As well as saving a significant portion of boot up time by reducing logging to vga on servers with particularly slow cards (helped everywhere, but we had a new batch of severs that were much slower than the old ones... too long ago for me to remember details though)
Nope, I'm sure. I install them.
It's the normal boot console. Just KMS changes the resolution during the boot. It's very useful for reading long log lines if the server needs close attention for any reason.
[In Linux] You can use 132 character wide text modes as well, so if the boot slowness disturbs you, you could if they work in your system. (Actually also 160 wide, but I wonder if they are as commonly supported..) In addition there's the netconsole, but I guess sometimes the network interface can be down.
Thanks for the info. Actually it doesn't. We seldom reboot our servers. We use the lights-out infrastructure provided by servers if needed (the BMC thingy).
You won't believe how finicky server GPUs can be. One of our servers can update the screen so slow during booting, not only you can read everything line by line, that 30 second boot takes more than 2 minutes because of it.