Why is my Linux console polluted with messages?
I have Windows 10 Professional installed on a laptop with a 10th gen Intel i7 and 16 GB of RAM. I installed Hyper-V Manager and spun up a Rocky Linux 8 VM with no GUI. All went fine. But after the install completed and I performed a reboot, I noticed I was getting random messages flashing across the console. I could be right in the middle of typing something and a message will just insert itself. It makes for a polluted and messy experience. Below is a screenshot for reference.
Console Screenshot
The message in the screenshot is not the only type of message that has flashed across the console, but it is the only one I've been able to capture thus far. Would anyone have any idea where these messages might be coming from and how to "turn them off" so that I can get things done more easily?
Not sure what the default is on Rocky Linux, but there is a kernel configuration value kernel.printk
that controls the level of alerts sent to the system console. You will want to adjust this. So people doing debugging want much higher levels of alerts. I am guessing you probably want something like your console alert value to be 3, or maybe 2.
I suggest a value of maybe kernel.printk = 3 4 1 3
. On a Debian/Ubuntu system I make this persistent by writing a file like this that will be read when the system boots.
# more /etc/sysctl.d/printk.conf
# Uncomment the following to stop low-level messages on console
kernel.printk = 3 4 1 3
See an older question I asked over on unix.stackexchange for a description of the various levels and purpose of each value.