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From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date:   Fri, 8 Jan 2021 15:11:34 -0800
Message-ID: <CAHk-=wjsjC1h7fskwYaaRLykN1ms6ZtxGvucQgmL-zZTfxPdBA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: fbcon: remove soft scrollback code (missing Doc. patch)
To:     Phillip Susi <phill@thesusis.net>
Cc:     Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>, Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "linux-doc@vger.kernel.org" <linux-doc@vger.kernel.org>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Daniel Vetter <daniel@ffwll.ch>
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On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 11:13 AM Phillip Susi <phill@thesusis.net> wrote:
>
> > Could we pause this madness? Scrollback is still useful. I needed it
> > today... it was too small, so command results I was looking for
> > already scrolled away, but... life will be really painful with 0
> > scrollback.
>
> > You'll need it, too... as soon as you get oops and will want to see
> > errors just prior to that oops.
>
> > If it means I get to maintain it... I'm not happy about it but that's
> > better than no scrollback.
>
> Amen!  What self respecting admin installs a gui on servers?  What do we
> have to do to get this back in?  What was so buggy with this code that
> it needed to be removed?  Why was it such a burden to just leave it be?

It really was buggy, with security implications. And we have no maintainers.

So the scroll-back code can't come back until we have a maintainer and
a cleaner and simpler implementation.

And no, maintaining it really doesn't mean "just get it back to the
old broken state".

So far I haven't actually seen any patches, which means that it's not
coming back.

The good news? If you have an actual text VGA console, that should
still work just fine.

                 Linus