Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 12, 2013, at 10:35 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> Am 12.03.2013 17:32, schrieb Chris Murphy:
>> On Mar 12, 2013, at 6:02 AM, Jiří Eischmann <eischmann at redhat.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> New kernels bring a lot of
>>> regressions and we don't have enough test coverage to avoid them. The
>>> general solution to those problems is to go back to the last working
>>> kernel version. But by making it less obvious we make these frequent
>>> problems more difficult to solve.
>> 
>> This is completely specious. A user who considers falling back to an 
>> older kernel as a troubleshooting step also knows how this selection 
>> is made and where to go look for it
> 
> THIS IS WRONG

Oh really?

> 
> how did YOU learn that you can boot the previous kernel?

Another user. I learned on a Fedora system that hid GRUB by default, must've been Fedora 12 or 13 I'm guessing. So it sure as f was not from the boot menu. Before that I vaguely remember mklinux, but I don't remember what boot loader they were using, and I don't remember seeing a menu other than to boot either mklinux or Mac OS.


> i learned it many years ago by facing the boot-menu


Well you wouldn't learn it today because of how grub2-mkconfig and grubby interact. Your first kernel update depends on grubby to write the entry in grub.cfg, and uses a nomenclature completely different than grub2-mkconfig. The grub menu, thus, is populated with a cryptic first entry that includes a kernel version number (not that any new user would know that), and the 2nd entry merely is the word "Fedora". There is nothing at all to imply choosing that is a fall back technique.

If there was a change to use only grub2-mkconfig for updating the grub.cfg; those older kernels are in Advanced options. New users aren't going to be tinkering with Advanced option unless they're innately tinkerers. They'll ask someone first.

And then, most new linux users with Windows or OS X experience, have no idea what a kernel even is. If they do, most don't know what the kernel does that system services don't. They don't know whether to blame a problem on kernel or service updates. 

Next it is never the case that Windows or OS X or mobile devices have multiple kernel versions. There is only one kernel at one time on such systems, it wouldn't occur to such users to fall back to an older kernel. They aren't present, and it's not a general troubleshooting technique. You'd have to learn this.

Even if I were to see a coherent list of kernels in a list by their date, it's unlikely I as a new user would have made the leap to try another option.


Chris Murphy