There is a very good reason why stuff like this is needed. Its to get
the boot messages out of a non-booting box, when you know that its oopsed
before fbcon can be initialised.
fbcon can't be initialised before PCI setup on many systems because the
PCI bus may not be setup, and therefore the VGA card may very well not
be accessible.
I think you'll find that virtually every architecture has some method
to get real early boot time messages out of the box in some way (on ARM,
it involves enabling CONFIG_DEBUG_LL and adding a function call into
printk.c, and attaching a machine to a serial port - this works from
the moment that we start executing any kernel image.)
You're not going to be able to design something to cover all cases.
Especially the ones where the normal C environment isn't up and running
yet. 8)
-- Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk) The developer of ARM Linux http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/