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My wireless driver is noisy. It prints out messages to the console every 10-30 seconds. So, if I'm working on VT1 or something, I get messages scrolling by all the time. Is there a way to shut this feature off? I like working on the virtual terminals, but this is making it hard to deal with. :)

Any ideas?

3 Answers 3

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You can use the command

sudo dmesg -n 1

to suppress all messages from the kernel (and its drivers) except panic messages from appearing on the console.

To fix at each boot, add the command to:

/etc/rc.local
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dmesg comes with two handy options for that:

-D, --console-off           disable printing messages to console
-E, --console-on            enable printing messages to console

dmesg -D is just a shortcut for dmesg -n 1, except that it stores the current log level, so that you can easily restore it with dmesg -E. So it's a bit more convenient than changing the log level with dmesg -n.

Additionally, you can check the current log level with:

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk
7       4       1       7

man klogctl for more explanations on these numbers...

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/proc/sys/kernel/printk

You can also set the log level directly with

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

which is basically what dmesg is doing.

The format of that file is explained at: https://superuser.com/a/793692/128124

loglevel command line boot parameter

Sets the initial value at boot time, which allows you to see pre-init messages.

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  • Hey hey, I tested myself by not reading your answer 1st and I nailed it \o/ that said can this be done with ‘sysctl’?
    – tijko
    Aug 18, 2022 at 18:15

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