Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Mike Pinkerton]

On 13 Mar 2013, at 14:51, Chris Murphy wrote:

>>
>> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected  
>> to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs?
>
> Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas  
> are Esc.


My question was more timing than keystroke -- whatever the keystroke,  
I don't think I can hit it in the 1 second boot scenario.


> On 13 Mar 2013, at 13:39, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>
>>> By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one  
>>> expected to get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs?
>>
>> Use UI that sets an EFI variable and then reboot.


If I understand this correctly, I have to log into a working system  
in order to set a flag in the firmware that will allow me to reboot  
into the firmware set-up program.

I'm not yet sold on having to boot into a working system in order to  
get back to the firmware or boot menu on a reboot.  Beyond the  
annoyance of having to boot something I don't want in order to get  
where I want to go, the process seems fragile to me.

Perhaps with age comes patience -- or orneriness, I'm not quite sure  
-- but I'm inclined to think that accepting the addition of 1-2  
seconds to boot time in order to have available a power-on key-hold  
route to a boot menu and firmware set-up program is not a  
particularly bad trade-off.

-- 
Mike