Video card debugging info (Mach64, Beige G3)- how to turn it off (Beige G3, YDL 4.0.1 and kernel 2.6.10-1)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

Whenever the effect of turning on or off various options in any kernel
drivers is in doubt, the most definitive way to find out for sure is to
look at the kernel source code. I find that a highly convenient way to do
that is to point a browser to http://lxr.linux.no and just browse. Of
course, it's not as convenient to people who can't make heads or tails of
it, so I've now taken a look there regarding this issue myself. I have
some bad news: The only configurable way to turn off this undesirable
behavior is to turn off the DEBUG flag for the atyfb driver, but
unfortunately doing that would also disable all the code that implements
several certain ioctl calls to the driver, which would quite likely be a
very bad thing. My advice would be to just tolerate this ridiculous
verbosity as best you can. IMO, none of the possible solutions would be
worth your time or effort.

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:52:40 -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:

> Hello all, I recently (today) got around to updating my Beige G3's
> kernel to 2.6.10-1, and, to adding the line: alias eth0 bmac to:
> /etc/modprobe.conf to ensure that networking works.
> 
> Anyway, now I get "debugging" info dumped onto my terminals whenever I
> switch to them from vt7. If I switch between vt1 and vt2 (for e.g.) I
> don't get this debugging info dumped to the vt, but if I switch back
> to vt7 and then back to one of the text vts I do get it dumped (to the
> text vt).
> 
> Does anyone know how to turn this behaviour off?
> 
> Thanks, Eric.
> 
> PS This is what the dump looks like (F=hexadecimal value):
> 
> debug atyfb: Mach64 non-shadow register values:
> debug 0x2000 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
> etc.
> 
> debug atyfb: Mach64 PLL register values:
> debug 0x00 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF
> etc.