I, too, had wondered what happened to scrollback in a non-GUI console. I always boot to a console and start a GUI with startx - but I sometimes to upgrades and stuff as root from the console.

I found the scrollback useful.

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Of course it was useful. And if you've ever built an LFS system, you'll know just how useful. You can do most of LFS in an xterm, but at the end, you have to boot your new system. And since it has a hand-built kernel, there's a lot that can go wrong with the boot, especially if it's your first time. How are you supposed to diagnose the problem if you can't scroll back?

Then you go on to BLFS. If you use a booted system to add all the stuff you need, the lack of scrolling could be a real problem when builds go wrong. You can get round that by working entirely in chroot from your old system using an xterm, but that seems to me rather a weird and artificial thing to have to do.

What I find strangest is that it was Linus himself who decided to sabotage the console.

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Probably Fedora fault, they do not even have boot messages anymore on TTY1, only a logo screen between grub2 and gdm.
There's no use for scrollback on that kind of setup when TTY is hidden and it boots straight to X or wayland.
Since I've always liked to see the messages on boot, I miss the scrollback feature now too.

What I do now is dmesg > /tmp/output && mcedit /tmp/output so I can scroll, search or whatever.

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Alan Mackenzie did a hack. Anyone dare?


https://linux.gentoo.user.narkive.co...-is-back-again

With latest update here... https://groups.google.com/g/linux.ge.../c/FEE_tL31oRs

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Slackware stable has 5.15.n but my main PC has current on 5.17.1 so unsure this'll work...

That's very nice but where's the patch? All those links show, as far as I can see, is a lot of talk about it. I would be quite happy to try it out if someone here provided it, assuming that it works for the 5.15 kernel, which is what Slackware-15 uses. There's no real risk, Jan. It's just a matter of rebuilding the kernel from source using that patch and Patrick's config file, and putting it into an alternative stanza in your boot manager.

Edit: Found it. Now I need to get the kernel source. I prefer to do this in the early morning when it doesn't get in the way of my peak band allowance. I'll let this thread know when I've done it.

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first time I noticed the scroll back not working, I thought there was suddenly something wrong with my computer. I really can't fathom what was going through Torvalds mind -- despite having read what he had to say about it.

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Is this what this topic is about?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/1/8/910

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Great. So what do I have to do to get a pure VGA console?

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Hazel:

I may have a DEC vt100 from the old PDP days in the garage...
or maybe some other really old guys have one they can spare?

New month, new download allowance, so I downloaded source for 5.15.19 (the official Slackware-15 kernel), patched it and built it using Patrick's config file. The patch ran without comment but the build took all day. And that's with 4 cores! I'd forgotten just how big a standard distro kernel is. When I build on LFS, I include only the drivers I need and it all completes in 3 hours, but I assume Pat's kernel is expertly tuned to Slackware so I felt safer using that.

I used "make oldconfig" and got asked just two questions, both about the console. That looks hopeful.

It's all on the ESP now and I shall try using it for tomorrow's boot.

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It boots! No problem. As soon as I got to the login prompt, I scrolled back. The display is a bit odd; it sometimes jumps to a second column and then back again. In some places, you get two parallel columns. But it's all there, right back to the first line about the partitions on sda.

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Actually 5.15.27 is now the official Slackware kernel, but I would like to get this working for Slackware-current: 5.17.3 (though I'm on 5.17.2 and haven't rebooted yet) and new kernels come regularly.

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You're right. 5.15.27 is the one I normally use. I found 5.15.19 in the main Slack-15 repo but I realise now that I should have downloaded the one from patches.

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Nice hazel !

Did you use the patch from Jan K's Post #19 ?

-- kjh