Increase grub timeout

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 12:19 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 11:01 +0200, Richard Zidlicky wrote:
> > On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 09:58:27AM +0200, Alexander Boström wrote:
> > 
> > > Long story short: There are situations where a grub menu is vital, like
> > > until you've successfully booted a new kernel.
> > 
> > of course, and I do not think it is so hard to think of a sensible behaviour.
> > 
> > After each (semi)automatic change to grub/kernel conf as well as for the very first 
> > boot there should be a timeout as well as visible menu.
> > Once the kernel did boot with default command line etc it would be safe to set 
> > the timeout to a small value - after asking the user. 
> > 
> > More elaborate solution, there could be two config values - quicktimeout and 
> > safetimout.
> > After kernel and config changes timeout would be changed to safetimout and once 
> > the kernel booted safely it could be reset to quicktimeout automatically.
> > 
> > Richard
> 
> Another options will be to test a successful boot flag. (E.g. a touch
> file in /boot/).
> If the file doesn't exists (Post installation, new kernel, failed
> boot/shutdown) grub should switch to a predefined timeout, giving the
> user time to react.
> 
> The main issue here, is grub changes. Such a feature will require
> changes to grub (code), kernel (post install script) and init functions.
> 
> While the last two are less problematic (bash scripts), given the fact
> that development of grub is slowly shifting to grub2, I doubt that the
> Fedora grub maintainers will be willing to spend time on such a feature
> when grub is be phased out. (Or is it?)
> 
> - Gilboa
> 

Actually, I do remember grub having a fallback feature.
It should solve the failed kernel upgrade problem.
However, it will not solve the failed first boot problem.

- Gilboa