Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 11.03.13 22:14, Till Maas (opensource at till.name) wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 09:09:46PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 
> > We are working on this in the systemd context. We will provide a tiny
> > mechanism, similar to localed/timedated/hostnamed that can be used by
> > desktop UIs to choose "boot into firmware", and "boot into other OS"
> > features, which can then be exposed on the shutdown button in the UI, or
> > in some configuration applet thingy or wherever the desktop UI wants to
> > put it.
> 
> Would the systemd feature also allow to for example boot the default
> kernel but allow to display a menu in parallel that can be used to boot
> a different kernel by reconfiguring the boot loader and initiating a
> reboot? Then it is possible to get both, nearly zero boot delay and a
> boot menu.

The machanism will certainly not "reconfigure" the boot loader. It will
pass additional information tot he boot loader or BIOS via EFI vars or
so, where that's available, but certainly not muck with the boot loader.

Whatever the mechanism does, you can always override everything from the
boot menu, just by pressing shift or whatever is necessary. The systemd
mechanism only gives the BIOS/boot loader *hints* that it would be cool
to do something on next reboot, like for example enter the firmware
setup, or boot into a specific OS, but the user should always be
empowered to do whatever he wants to do if the machine reboots.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.