Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Peter Jones]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 05:19:52PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Le Mar 12 mars 2013 16:10, Peter Jones a écrit :
> > On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 12:58:05PM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> This assumes nothing can go wrong after the login manager is started (for
> example, the login manager hitting a selinux denial when it tries to use
> new features exposed by the new kernel), and that the system is able to
> detect a running, but useless login manager (input or gfx broken by new
> kernel)

We can certainly add other reasons to signal that we need to enable
menus on the reboot, and I'm welcome to better ideas.  I'm just
sketching out what I think is better here.  You're right, we probably
should have some way of saying "some user interaction that isn't just
the user banging his laptop against a monkey like the femur in 2001 has
taken place" and make that /a/ determining factor.  And possibly other
signals that things /didn't/ work.

> Did anyone check the X guys were ok with a setup where they had no longer
> any room for error? They heavily depend on users being able to boot on the
> previous kernel when there is a driver problem.

Obviously we need to do a good job of making sure we tolerate failures,
and there are multiple ways to do this - if you reboot N times within M
seconds or somesuch might be a worthwhile heuristic.  This would be a
great thread to discuss what a good set of "boot succeeded" and "boot
failed" indicators are.

-- 
        Peter