Bug 3116 - Server log is noisy, unhelpful, and/or misleading
Summary: Server log is noisy, unhelpful, and/or misleading
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: xorg
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Server/General (show other bugs)
Version: git
Hardware: All All
: high normal
Assignee: Xorg Project Team
QA Contact: Xorg Project Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: janitor
: 1406 (view as bug list)
Depends on: 927 2141 2142 3016 3224 3687 4837 4948
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2005-04-23 12:33 UTC by Adam Jackson
Modified: 2018-06-11 18:17 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments

Description Adam Jackson 2005-04-23 12:33:18 UTC
This is a tracker for the general issue that the server's log output is awful.
Comment 1 Alan Coopersmith 2005-04-24 09:08:23 UTC
A recent logfile improvement David Dawes put into XFree86 was going through all
the drivers mode validation functions and fix them to return more specific errors
than "MODE_BAD" whereever possible.   Seems like a reasonable project to recreate
(not copying David's code directly of course) on our side if someone has a couple
of hours to spare.
Comment 2 Adam Jackson 2005-05-06 14:48:49 UTC
users are trained to interpret (WW) and (EE) as Very Bad Things.  as a general guideline we should only 
issue (EE) statements when we know for absolute certain that the issue the message diagnoses is going 
to be fatal to the server.  (WW) is a bit of a judgement call but should be kept to a minimum at any rate.  
Bug #2141 is a good example of a bad X_WARNING.
Comment 3 Adam Jackson 2005-06-27 16:22:57 UTC
*** Bug 1406 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 Hans Deragon 2005-07-06 10:57:12 UTC
Sometimes I set the monitor properly in xorg.conf, yet I can't get the
resolution I want at 75Hz even though it supports it.  I would like to see the
logs specifically tell me why it could not work at 75Hz, i.e. what the problem is.

Also, once X chooses a resolution, I would like to see it show up in the logs. 
I cannot tell what resolution was choosen by reading the logs.  Sometimes it is
obvious that 1280x1024 was not selected, but am I in 800x600 or 640x400?  In
some OS with a simple X login, it is not easy to guess by looking at the screen.
 I nice clear message in the logs would be helpfull.
Comment 5 Adam Jackson 2005-11-19 04:17:31 UTC
the remaining blockers on this aren't severe enough to block 7.0.
Comment 6 Adam Jackson 2006-04-04 08:02:55 UTC
removing from 5041 blocker, 4837 isn't strong enough to block release.
Comment 7 Luc Verhaegen 2006-04-04 23:20:55 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> A recent logfile improvement David Dawes put into XFree86 was going through all
> the drivers mode validation functions and fix them to return more specific errors
> than "MODE_BAD" whereever possible.   Seems like a reasonable project to recreate
> (not copying David's code directly of course) on our side if someone has a couple
> of hours to spare.
Some of this ModeStatus noise will get resolved by my removal of multiple
clockRanges. This is because of clockRange checking returning the pretty useless
MODE_CLOCK_RANGE.

The few quick and dirty culls/cleanups i've done locally had the clockRange
checking (replacing the clockrange search, as we have only one (dot)clockRange
per CRTC) return something useful.

This will happen at the same time as the static dotclock clean-up though, which
sadly depends on mach64 clean-up.
Comment 8 Erik Andren 2006-04-18 00:38:40 UTC
Are there any papers defining what kind of verbosity the different log levels
are supposed to have?
Comment 9 Daniel Stone 2007-02-27 01:26:29 UTC
Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.
Comment 10 chemtech 2013-03-15 14:32:47 UTC
ajax at nwnk dot net 
Do you still experience this issue with newer soft ?
Please check the status of your issue.
Comment 11 Adam Jackson 2018-06-11 18:17:31 UTC
The bug summary is certainly still true, but this should be tracked with more specific bugs for individual issues.


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