Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nils Philippsen]

On Wed, 2013-03-13 at 14:29 +0100, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> I don't see a glaring error with this idea. What do you
> think?

Well, I talked to a few guys in the office about it and there's one
interesting issue with part of my idea: trying to detect multi-boot
environments means that the boot loader won't behave in a deterministic
fashion, it'll try to adapt to my behavior and always lag behind. So I'd
leave this part out and make it like that, i.e. much simpler:

- Enable/adapt timeout if an error condition is detected (whether that
happens through measuring the time between boots, or something else, or
a combination needs to be evaluated).
- Measure "time for successful reboot" as described in my original post
to enable/adapt the timeout for long POSTs. Usually the reboot/POST
times won't vary that much, so store this time somewhere and use it to
make decisions during cold boots. If some hardware is added/removed
which influences POST time drastically the first boot will be off w.r.t.
timeout -- aw, shucks.

People "in the know" can always configure the boot loader to do nothing
fancy but a set, or no timeout, or override booting once through key
strokes or whatever. Making this discoverable without cluttering up the
boot process is left as an exercise to the reader, but I guess would
belong somewhere into System Settings or equivalent, or the "Help
System" should we ever grow one integrated thing instead of a number of
competing approaches (man pages, info pages, N different desktop help
systems). Oh well.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen      "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase 
Red Hat               a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty
nils at redhat.com       nor Safety."  --  Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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