Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 11.03.13 19:21, Tomasz Torcz (tomek at pipebreaker.pl) wrote:
>
>> > > Fine with me, but don't forget to  have a hint to this key visible e.
>> > > g.,  "Press F1 to..." in some corner. Current
>> > > policy that user  just should know the key is not that good IMHO.
>> > > After all, this is the first screen a newcomer
>> > > meets. And thisis not only about the initial grub boot but also the
>> > > "main" boot process (and screen)  that follows.
>> >
>> >
>> > I really do like the idea of a line which says:
>> > "Press <some key> to see what's going on right now"
>> > It creates a learning opportunity for new users and a relatively benign
>> > way to present this info.
>>
>>  “Press ESC for details” is fine. The only problem is that we have to include
>> half of graphical stack to render this text correctly.  And in correct locale.
>
> I don't think we should generate any message. Nothing at all. My BIOS
> doesn't print a single line, and neither does the kernel if "quiet" is
> used (which is the default). I really don't see why Plymouth or the boot
> loader should print any more -- unless a real problem happens, or the
> user explicitly asked for more, or the boot takes very long.
>
> Entering the boot loader is something that is a debugging feature, a
> tool for professionals. It shouldn't be too hard to expect from them to
> remember something as simple as maybe "press shift or Space or Esc" to
> get the boot menu or more verbose output. I mean, honestly, that's
> probably what most people would try automatically anyway if they want
> feedback from the machine.
>
> We nowadays live in times where BIOS POST takes 500ms, the kernel one
> second and userspace another one [1], with times like that you really
> don't need any bootsplash or anything. With Windows 8 the laptop BIOSes
> finally got fixed to be silent and quick during POST. Now its our turn
> to achieve the same for the boot loader and the OS, both of which we
> control.

Clearly you haven't used any modern EFI server systems where I've used
systems which take 15 minutes to post (and I can kickstart an entire
RHEL-6 install less than 7 mins) and are generally longer than their
predecessors

Peter