Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:10:27 -0400
Peter Jones <pjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> Honestly, I'd like to do this anyway - the grub2 gfxterm code seems to
> cause nothing but bugs in later graphics setup.  That said, I'd rather
> go back to not having it at all, but with a different plan than last
> time.
> 
> The idea would be to have a positive indication from systemd that
> we've gotten to some pre-defined point on the previous boot (say,
> starting your login manager), and not to show you any menu unless the
> previous boot didn't get that far.  So when you install a new kernel,
> the process would look like:

...snip reasonable plan... 

One downside: systemd can see that it started your display manager
fine, but it can't tell that it's actually displayed correctly. I guess
we can try this and see how often a case like that happens. 

> On BIOS machines I think we can still accomplish #1 and #2 as well,
> but there's no guarantee of a way to disable firmware timeouts or
> "press f2 for setup" screens and loading the usb stack.

If it's at all possible, I personally would vastly prefer "hold down
any key" to get to the menu. 

rationale: 

a) It's very easy to document
b) it avoids keymap / keyboard / locale issues.
"I don't have function keys", etc. 
c) if avoids people who have slow reaction time 
"Hit F1 in 5 seconds"
d) It means you can hold down the key and boot and don't need to send
your full attention to it until it's at the grub menu. 
(for some servers that take minutes to get to grub, it's very easy to
get distracted, miss the window and have to reboot again). 

kevin
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