Bug#718416: Debian Bug#718416: closed by Dmitry Bogatov

[Adam Borowski]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 08:50:35AM +0000, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
> The world really does want one to clean one's screen, and there are multiple
> layers of stuff to unpick if one does not want to do so.
> 
> * https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/233855/5132

Starting X will also kill any scrollback, unless you recompile your kernel
with CONFIG_VGACON_SOFT_SCROLLBACK_PERSISTENT_ENABLE_BY_DEFAULT=y, which is
not enabled by default, and doesn't work on drivers other than vgacon.  For
most of us, nouveau conflicts with it.

Things that make the system crash, reboot, or get unresponsive will also
make it impossible to read the console output.  Thus, it might be easiest to
get some way to put it to another machine.  I for one use serial on all home
boxes, there's also IPMI, and qemu does it well for virtual machines.

And then, clearing the screen -- including scrollback -- is a good default
for privacy reasons.  Of course, you don't care about privacy if physically
reaching your computer means you already lost.


Meow!
-- 
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⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ sky.  Your cat demands food.  The priority should be obvious...