Improving the Fedora boot experience

Denys Vlasenko dvlasenk at redhat.com
Thu Mar 14 11:22:46 UTC 2013


On 03/12/2013 02:33 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Tue, 12.03.13 09:13, Steve Clark (sclark at netwolves.com) wrote:
> 
>> How many times do you boot your system each day? 10? Okay thats a
>> whole 20 additional seconds.
> 
> This is way up on my list of most non-sensical arguments about building
> OSes, right next to "Linux is about choice".
> 
> This bullshit about "boot times don't matter" is just entirely bogus,
> and it doesn't get better by constant repitition.
> 
> Fast boot times matter on desktops,

Depends on what is "fast". 1-2 seconds during boot
is not important on desktops.

> they matter on embedded, they matter
> on mobile,

Yes.

> they matter or servers

Wrong. Servers can spare 5s of seconds.
Normally, servers need reboots much less often than once a day.

> Fast boot times save you time and energy.

Phlease.

> Fast boot times improve the first impression our OS makes on people.

How about first impression an OS would do if it broke after upgrade
and you need black magic to even _see_ where boot fails?

> You know: *you* might not need fast boot. *Your* systems you might not
> reboot only every other week. *Your* server system might have a very
> slow BIOS POST. But we don't do this OS for *you* alone. Fedora has a
> certain claim of universality. And that's why fast boot matters to
> Fedora.

I aqree that reasonably fast boot is good.
I disagree that it should be instantaneous (by default) on desktops
or laptops.

Show "Press ESC to see boot menu" for one second before
booting the default kernel. Fast enough. Clear enough.



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