Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Lennart Poettering
<mzerqung at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 11.03.13 20:22, Peter Robinson (pbrobinson at gmail.com) wrote:
>
>> > 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.
>>
>> Clearly you haven't used any modern EFI server systems where I've used
>> systems which take 15 minutes to post (and I can kickstart an entire
>> RHEL-6 install less than 7 mins) and are generally longer than their
>> predecessors
>
> Clearly, you haven't used any modern EFI laptop system where POST is
> 500ms.

Yep, I have one of those as well.

> So, we both now pointed out that each other is terribly naive, what did
> us bring that?
>
> Are you really arguing that because your EFI system is slow we should
> make it even slower by adding pointless 15s delays into the boot
> everywhere?

Nope, I never said it's not something worth doing, I believe as
someone who runs single Fedora systems pretty much everywhere it's
worthwhile. It's also something that on my 500ms EFI booting laptop
would rarely impact me as I reboot it about once a month and use
suspend/resume most of the time too.

Peter