Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Fabian Deutsch]

> Von: Ray Strode
> >> This is an interesting idea, but I don't think plymouth makes it any
> >> easier to display CJK & Indic glyphs. (Please someone more technical
> >> tell me if I'm wrong here, I vaguely remember this being an issue when
> >> we wanted to add a messagse to fedup)
> >
> > I hoped that it would be easier to localize plymouth compared to grub2. In
> > addition to that we'd also get rid of problems resulting of the
> > interaction between grub2 s gfx stack and the kernel/plymouth, and last but
> > not least we wouldn't need to maintain a theme for grub.
> Yea it's not really easier. We start plymouth in the initrd, and we
> don't have fonts, translations, font rendering libraries or anything
> in the initrd. we could ship those things in the initrd but it would
> make the initrd substantially larger.

I see. I don't think that we want to pull all that stuff into initrd.

> Of course we can do localized text fine on systems that don't have
> initrds, or at later points in the boot process after we've switched
> out of the initrd.

What I could think of is providing the necessary strings as bitmaps or -
following your note - that we populate the screen after the switch form initrd.

I'd say that the whole boot process is fine to display any boot related message.
The only case I can think of which doesn't fit into this idea, is a non-booting
kernel - because of an incorrect cmdline or because the kernel has a problem.

- fabian