trying to understand dmesg

[Marius Gedminas]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 01:23:34AM +0200, Dimitri Mallis wrote:
> hi, i am trying to understand everything that comes out of dmesg so i can
> trouble shoot my pc...

That may be a difficult task.  I strongly suspect that some of the
messages can be understood only by those kernel developers that work on
the drivers in question.

> what do the following mean?

Many of my answers will be guesses.

>   1. Aperture from northbridge cpu 0 too small (32 MB)

No idea.

>   2. SELinux: Disabled at boot.

It means exactly what it says: the SELinux framework was disabled.
Probably by a kernel command line option.

>   3. audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)

No idea.

>   4. RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 65536K size 1024
>   blocksize

What it says.  RAMDISK is a way to simulate a disk device by keeping its
contents in memory.  I don't think it's used much these days; tmpfs is a
better solution because it grows as needed.

>   5. ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with
>   idebus=xx

Informative.

>   6. ACPI Exception (acpi_processor-0693): AE_NOT_FOUND, Processor
>   Device is not present [20060707]

Heh.  Many BIOSes are somewhat broken with regards to ACPI.

>   7. GSI 16 sharing vector 0xD9 and IRQ 16

No idea.

>   8. ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0)

Looks like you have a SATA interface with no disks attached.

>   9. NFORCE-CK804: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later

Informative.

>   10. NFORCE-CK804: BIOS didn't set cable bits correctly. Enabling
>   workaround. >>> this worries me

I wouldn't worry if I were you.  All sorts of hardware devices and
BIOSes have bugs that Linux drivers have to work around.

>   11. forcedeth: using HIGHDMA ???

forcedeth is the driver name for the nforce chipset.  HIGHDMA is a way
of transfering data from memory areas that have addresses too high to be
reachable by normal DMA.

>   12. input: PC Speaker as /class/input/input1

The kernel detected that you have a PC Speaker.  I've no idea why it is
registered as an input device.

>   13. bttv0: i2c: checking for MSP34xx @ 0x80... not found

The bttv driver was looking for a certain kind of a TV tuner card, but
didn't find one.

>   14. ts: Compaq touchscreen protocol output

The kernel found a touchsceen.

>   15. drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters
>   Driver

Another driver reports that it was being loaded

>   16. md: md driver 0.90.3 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27

Same here.  md is the driver for software RAID.

>   17. ibm_acpi: ec object not found

The ThinkPad ACPI driver did not find an embedded controller.  Maybe
this isn't a thinkpad laptop.

>   18. [drm] Setting GART location based on new memory map

Direct Memory Manager is the kernel part of the Direct Rendering
infrastructure that allows efficient 3D drivers.  GART has something to
do with AGP.

>   19. lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions

lo usually refers to the virtual loopback network interface.  I've no
idea what those privacy extensions are.

>   20. bttv0: timeout: drop=65 irq=22617/22617, risc=1f390024, bits:
>   HSYNC OFLOW FDSR

bttv again.  If you have a tv tuner card, and have problems recording
video with it, this message may be useful.

HTH,
Marius Gedminas
-- 
Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art.  Software Engineering
might be science; but that's not what I do.  I'm a hacker, not an engineer.
        -- jwz
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