Increase grub timeout
Matt McCutchen
matt at mattmccutchen.net
Sat May 15 09:24:26 UTC 2010
On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 11:01 +0200, Richard Zidlicky wrote:
> 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.
Neat idea. But if a breaking kernel change somehow occurs without
triggering the change to the safetimeout, we would not want the user to
be completely stuck. I see two ways to address that:
- Make quicktimeout nonzero enough that the user has time to react.
- When grub attempts booting with quicktimeout, have it change to
safetimeout. Then have an initscript that changes back to quicktimeout
once booting has succeeded. Grub already has a "default boot entry"
field in the stage2 image that can be written by boot commands for
exactly this purpose; see the info docs. The same could be done for the
timeout. (This would appear to be a common trick: my Dell Latitude
D620's BIOS does the same thing with the power-on self test.)
--
Matt
More information about the devel
mailing list