Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 13, 2013, at 4:56 PM, Mike Pinkerton <pselists at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 
> On 13 Mar 2013, at 14:51, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs?
>> 
>> Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc.
> 
> 
> My question was more timing than keystroke -- whatever the keystroke, I don't think I can hit it in the 1 second boot scenario.

Apple's litany of key shortcuts is related to the lack of a firmware setup menu, and probably why there's some boot delay. This delay seems to get longer with more, or stale, NVRAM entries, but still has been faster, until recently, than BIOS hardware.


>> On 13 Mar 2013, at 13:39, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> 
>>>> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs?
>>> 
>>> Use UI that sets an EFI variable and then reboot.
> 
> 
> If I understand this correctly, I have to log into a working system in order to set a flag in the firmware that will allow me to reboot into the firmware set-up program.

I don't know that the firmware OEMs, or Microsoft, envision entering the firmware setup as a means of troubleshooting a broken system.


> 
> I'm not yet sold on having to boot into a working system in order to get back to the firmware or boot menu on a reboot.  Beyond the annoyance of having to boot something I don't want in order to get where I want to go, the process seems fragile to me.

I'm not quite following the lack of USB initialization during UEFI boot services, but presumably an add-on boot manager (or even the firmware setup utility which is just a uefi boot application) could load a USB driver.

In your case you'd have an NVRAM entry instructing the built-in UEFI boot manager to execute a boot manager other than the Windows one, such as GRUB, gummiboot, or rEFInd. Then it's up to how they're configured whether you see a menu and what's in that menu. In the case of GRUB as the boot manager, I can configure it to hide the menu, replacing it with a countdown timer instead, upon timeout the default entry boots immediately or I can interrupt the countdown (only with ESC) and cause the menu to appear.


Chris Murphy