11.5 Console Output
peinit writes its own operational messages to /dev/console:
- Phase 1 progress — mount results, registryd starting.
- Phase 2 progress — services starting and failing, dependency errors.
- Shutdown progress.
- Recovery mode entry.
- Critical service failures.
Service output is never echoed to the console. The console is for
peinit's own messages; a service that wants a terminal asks for one with
TTYPath.
11.5.1 Severity and quiet #
Each message carries a severity, and peios.quiet (§2.6) decides what
that means:
- At
0, everything is written. - At
1, the default, peinit stays out of a terminal held as the controlling terminal of a running service, except to announce loss of the system. Terminals are matched by device rather than by path, since/dev/consoleand/dev/ttyS<n>can be the same device; where the device cannot be determined peinit assumes the terminal is held. - At
2, ordinary progress is dropped everywhere while errors still get through.
Suppressed messages are discarded rather than buffered for later.
Shutdown progress carries ordinary status severity, so peios.quiet=2
suppresses it along with every other kind of progress.
The autorun step in Phase 1 (§2.3) bypasses the policy entirely, on the grounds that a script running that early and going wrong is worth interrupting anything for.