Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Brian Wheeler]

Repeating that "fast boot times matter" is just as bogus as saying they 
don't.  The 2 or 3 seconds that's being talked about here has no 
meaningful impact on anything other than embedded users and they're 
probably not using grub anyway.

Fedora 18 screwed my laptop pretty thoroughly since the ATI drivers 
would hang the machine on resume.  Having the menu there so I could 
chose an alternate kernel was a godsend, especially since the newer 
kernel wasn't always better than the previous.

2 seconds isn't hurting anyone and its more than likely going to make it 
easier on someone to have that menu there.  Many non-server systems 
hibernate or suspend anyway, so they're only going to see the menu on a 
hard reboot.

Additionally, having the ability to hit escape and see what is going on 
when the progress bar has hung has also saved me on occasion.

On 03/12/2013 09:33 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Tue, 12.03.13 09:13, Steve Clark (sclark at netwolves.com) wrote:
>
>> How many times do you boot your system each day? 10? Okay thats a
>> whole 20 additional seconds.
> This is way up on my list of most non-sensical arguments about building
> OSes, right next to "Linux is about choice".
>
> This bullshit about "boot times don't matter" is just entirely bogus,
> and it doesn't get better by constant repitition.
>
> Fast boot times matter on desktops, they matter on embedded, they matter
> on mobile, they matter or servers, they matter everywhere.
>
> Fast boot times matter to dual-boot users, they matter to everybdoy who
> doesn't run his system 24/7, they matter in container setups, they
> matter in HA setups, they matter in the cloud, they matter for people
> who update their system, they matter to people with discontiniuous power
> supplies, they matter to provide users with a sane user experience.
>
> Fast boot times save you time and energy. They increase reliability, and
> applicability.
>
> Fast boot times improve the first impression our OS makes on people.
>
> And yes, I know that some BIOSes suck, and are slower than the OS to
> boot. But that's -- for once -- something that *does* not matter, and is
> no excuse for having everything else to be slow, too. The Windows 8
> certification *requires* fast POST from all machines, and so, it's only
> getting better, and we should do our bit about it.
>
> You know: *you* might not need fast boot. *Your* systems you might not
> reboot only every other week. *Your* server system might have a very
> slow BIOS POST. But we don't do this OS for *you* alone. Fedora has a
> certain claim of universality. And that's why fast boot matters to
> Fedora.
>
> Lennart
>