On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Michael Schwendt wrote: > It is like you described. /var/log/dmesg is a snapshot of the kernel > ring buffer created with the dmesg command near the end of the > rc.sysinit script. At run-time it can happen that boot-time > information is pushed out of the ring buffer and "dmesg" would only > print the more recent messages. So, the place to look would be > /var/log/dmesg. ah, that clears things up somewhat. so once /var/log/dmesg is created anew via rc.sysinit, it is a static file from then on. as in, it will not be appended to during normal system operation so it doesn't matter when you check it. OTOH, "dmesg" will continue accumulating kernel output, and will eventually start cycling because of the finite kernel ring buffer. gotcha. rday p.s. and if what you're interested in falls beyond what is in /var/log/dmesg, you can also check /var/log/boot.log.
