Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 11.03.13 19:21, Tomasz Torcz (tomek at pipebreaker.pl) wrote:

> > > Fine with me, but don't forget to  have a hint to this key visible e. 
> > > g.,  "Press F1 to..." in some corner. Current
> > > policy that user  just should know the key is not that good IMHO.
> > > After all, this is the first screen a newcomer
> > > meets. And thisis not only about the initial grub boot but also the 
> > > "main" boot process (and screen)  that follows.
> > 
> > 
> > I really do like the idea of a line which says:
> > "Press <some key> to see what's going on right now"
> > It creates a learning opportunity for new users and a relatively benign
> > way to present this info.
> 
>  “Press ESC for details” is fine. The only problem is that we have to include
> half of graphical stack to render this text correctly.  And in correct locale.

I don't think we should generate any message. Nothing at all. My BIOS
doesn't print a single line, and neither does the kernel if "quiet" is
used (which is the default). I really don't see why Plymouth or the boot
loader should print any more -- unless a real problem happens, or the
user explicitly asked for more, or the boot takes very long.

Entering the boot loader is something that is a debugging feature, a
tool for professionals. It shouldn't be too hard to expect from them to
remember something as simple as maybe "press shift or Space or Esc" to
get the boot menu or more verbose output. I mean, honestly, that's
probably what most people would try automatically anyway if they want
feedback from the machine.

We nowadays live in times where BIOS POST takes 500ms, the kernel one
second and userspace another one [1], with times like that you really
don't need any bootsplash or anything. With Windows 8 the laptop BIOSes
finally got fixed to be silent and quick during POST. Now its our turn
to achieve the same for the boot loader and the OS, both of which we
control.

Lennart

Footnotes:

[1] Yes, we are quite far from that on Fedora, but that's unlikely to
    change until broken LVM finally gets kicked out of the default
    install, and we systematically start to care about boot times (For
    example, why does abrt need to run all the time, it should be
    absolutely enough to start it when the first coredump
    happens...). Also, GNOME currently takes another 8s, but I am
    working on that slowly but surely.


-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.