"The following patch makes it possible to give kernel messages a selectable color which helps to distinguish it from other noise, such as boot messages," explained Jan Engelhardt, along with a 43 line patch to the char driver. As justification for the patch he offered, "NetBSD has it, OpenBSD has it, FreeBSD to some extent, so I think Linux should too." He also noted that an earlier version of the small patch had been previously posted back in April.

Ingo Molnar responded favorably, "looks really good to me!" He went on to suggest, "feature request: would be interesting to have a color table (defined in the .config) dependent on message loglevel. That way KERN_CRIT messages could be red, KERN_INFO ones white, etc."