Post by Kevin McAleavey on Nov 27, 2010 3:40:48 GMT -5
Didn't mean to spook anyone with what we've done with the Beta3 bootup screens. It would appear that we've unintentionally scared some folks with the latest Beta build's startup diagnostics screens despite the warning at the beginning that these should be disregarded UNLESS for some reason KNOS fails to boot.
Therefore, I'd like to explain that the raft of messages which display when KNOS boots where it will often provide messages that appear to indicate a problem, error or failure should genuinely be ignored entirely UNLESS for some reason KNOS doesn't boot up to the desktop. We added all sorts of extremely detailed messages during the bootup sequence just in case a particular machine doesn't boot since we've had about 12 people out of hundreds whose machines didn't boot into KNOS.
When this has happened in the past, the lack of extreme details left us with people who had a problem and the normal bootup information left us absolutely no clue as to what had happened, and in the absence of technical information as to what might have caused it, we were unable in a few cases to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
To that end, we configured the BSD kernel to provide all sorts of information on the screen at startup, including every single "decision" it makes depending on what hardware it finds, along with what hardware it DOESN'T find. As part of the normal process, since KNOS has no way of knowing the particular machine it's booting on, it goes through a process of seeing if this chipset or that chipset exists until it discovers the correct kernel code to run for a specific machine. And in doing so, if it guesses wrong, it can only determine that a particular guess is wrong by probing further until its guess returns some sort of error which indicates that the guess in question is wrong and that it should keep guessing until it gets it right. That's what those errors are about, and they should be ignored UNLESS KNOS fails to fully boot.
We put those in there just in case it doesn't, in hopes that any of that information might help us figure out why, and then what we should inform the BSD kernel designers to do in order to properly detect an errant machine or whose existence they aren't aware of in order to prevent that problem in their next code builds.
So if you see weird stuff in there as the machine is booting up, or spot errors or other "uh-oh" things, please relax about it - it's just KNOS "thinking" as it tries to configure itself properly for the machine it is being started on. We "geeks" like to use words like "error" or "warning" as an indication that something might need attention. But at the same time, the way we've written KNOS, many if not all of these "errors" are handled internally once the code sees them without any need for intervention or concern on YOUR part.
Apologies for all this silliness in the bootup cycle - there have been a handful of anomolies among a few of our prior testers, and we did all that in order to get to the bottom of a few remaining mysteries that weren't as obvious as we had hoped, thus this additional "detail" in the bootup in Beta3.
Bottom line, if KNOS comes up on your machine, then all of that was meaningless ... that stuff only matters if it DOESN'T come up. And in the even more rare situation of a "kernel panic" owing to something on a particular machine being *really* whacky, a screenshot from a digital camera might be the only way to show us where it hurts. That's why we did all that in the first place.
Therefore, I'd like to explain that the raft of messages which display when KNOS boots where it will often provide messages that appear to indicate a problem, error or failure should genuinely be ignored entirely UNLESS for some reason KNOS doesn't boot up to the desktop. We added all sorts of extremely detailed messages during the bootup sequence just in case a particular machine doesn't boot since we've had about 12 people out of hundreds whose machines didn't boot into KNOS.
When this has happened in the past, the lack of extreme details left us with people who had a problem and the normal bootup information left us absolutely no clue as to what had happened, and in the absence of technical information as to what might have caused it, we were unable in a few cases to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
To that end, we configured the BSD kernel to provide all sorts of information on the screen at startup, including every single "decision" it makes depending on what hardware it finds, along with what hardware it DOESN'T find. As part of the normal process, since KNOS has no way of knowing the particular machine it's booting on, it goes through a process of seeing if this chipset or that chipset exists until it discovers the correct kernel code to run for a specific machine. And in doing so, if it guesses wrong, it can only determine that a particular guess is wrong by probing further until its guess returns some sort of error which indicates that the guess in question is wrong and that it should keep guessing until it gets it right. That's what those errors are about, and they should be ignored UNLESS KNOS fails to fully boot.
We put those in there just in case it doesn't, in hopes that any of that information might help us figure out why, and then what we should inform the BSD kernel designers to do in order to properly detect an errant machine or whose existence they aren't aware of in order to prevent that problem in their next code builds.
So if you see weird stuff in there as the machine is booting up, or spot errors or other "uh-oh" things, please relax about it - it's just KNOS "thinking" as it tries to configure itself properly for the machine it is being started on. We "geeks" like to use words like "error" or "warning" as an indication that something might need attention. But at the same time, the way we've written KNOS, many if not all of these "errors" are handled internally once the code sees them without any need for intervention or concern on YOUR part.
Apologies for all this silliness in the bootup cycle - there have been a handful of anomolies among a few of our prior testers, and we did all that in order to get to the bottom of a few remaining mysteries that weren't as obvious as we had hoped, thus this additional "detail" in the bootup in Beta3.
Bottom line, if KNOS comes up on your machine, then all of that was meaningless ... that stuff only matters if it DOESN'T come up. And in the even more rare situation of a "kernel panic" owing to something on a particular machine being *really* whacky, a screenshot from a digital camera might be the only way to show us where it hurts. That's why we did all that in the first place.