On Sun, 26 Aug 2007, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > What I mean is that probably there used to be a printk() call starting with > `\n'. Then someone added a `KERN_ERR' in front of it. I gather '\n' at the beginning is to assure the following line is output on a separate line rather than as a continuation of another one which may have been output without a trailing '\n'. A situation where printk() is called with a string containing no trailing '\n' may be discouraged, but there are some more or less justified exceptions. For example the SCSI disk spin-up code is one. Therefore it may be reasonable for more critical messages -- perhaps not ones at KERN_ERR, but certainly KERN_CRIT and higher ones -- that may potentially happen asynchronously to start with '\n'. In this case a call would look like this: printk("\n" KERN_CRIT "The actual message.\n"); Of course based on "console_loglevel" and "default_message_level" the leading '\n' may still get swallowed from what gets printed to the console terminal, but in reality I do not think that poses a problem, as these both can be set by a system administrator according to the local policy. Maciej - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html