I left this note at 2012/06/11 09:15:59, three years ago, when I got this message after updated util-linux from 2.20.1-r1 to 2.20.1-r2:

* Messages for package sys-apps/util-linux-2.20.1-r2:

* The agetty util now clears the terminal by default.  You
* might want to add --noclear to your /etc/inittab lines.

Starting with this version, agetty clears the screen by default and you wouldn’t be able to read those messages from booting after boot process is done. I can’t remember if it also cleared scrolling buffer or not, if not, Shift+Page Up can scroll back. I think it does, or I wouldn’t even notice the problem and wrote this note.

This probably wouldn’t be useful since 2.20.1 was released on 2011-10-20, almost four years ago. If you had this problem with the clearing of boot messages, you should already found --no-clear already. Anyway, just an archived note for myself.

In /etc/inittab, I had:

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux

Just put --noclear after agetty:

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty --noclear 38400 tty1 linux
c2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux

There are more on Arch Linux’s wiki, /etc/issue might also cause a screen clear if it’s designed to do so, but you can scroll back up, just a bit of inconvenient.

By the way, I commented out console c3 to c6, that’s why I only listed two lines above, you don’t really need that many, just two are enough to resolve problems when something goes wrong. It’s just wasting memory if I had more than two, in my opinion.