Hi!
From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
commit 50145474f6ef4a9c19205b173da6264a644c7489 upstream.
This (and the VGA soft scrollback) turns out to have various nasty small special cases that nobody really is willing to fight. The soft scrollback code was really useful a few decades ago when you typically used the console interactively as the main way to interact with the machine, but that just isn't the case any more.
So it's not worth dragging along.
It is still useful.
In particular, kernel is now very verbose, so important messages during bootup scroll away. It is way bigger deal when you can no longer get to them using shift-pageup.
fsck is rather verbose, too, and there's no easy way to run that under X terminal... and yes, that makes scrollback very useful, too.
So, I believe we'll need to fix this. I guess I could do it. I also guess I'll not have to, because SuSE or RedHat will want to fix it.
Anyway, this really should not be merged into stable.
It's merged into the stable trees that _I_ have to maintain. If you want to revert it for trees you maintain and wish to keep secure, that's up to you. But it's something that I _STRONGLY_ do not advise doing.
I believe it will need to be reverted in Linus' tree, too. In fact, the patch seems to be a way for Linus to find a maintainer for the code, and I already stated I can do it. Patch is so new it was not even in -rc released by Linus.
See the email recently on oss-devel for one such reason why this was removed...
Would you have a link for that? Pavel