Fedora 8 Boot Process

[Brian Tate]

Hey Gian,

    Thanks for taking the time to explain all that; sounds much better now.

Good luck.

Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> Brian Tate escribió:
>> To Jeremy and Gian-
>>
>> Well that's good.. after reading your posts I am comforted to know 
>> the boot process isn't going out the window. I guess I was just 
>> worried that I'd be stuck using text-only mode for the functionality 
>> I enjoy now. Because I know having fancy graphics chipset drivers 
>> load on the boot for good effects will work on older cards, I know it 
>> probably won't work for cards that are new and have limited x11 
>> driver support. So it'd be nice for those cards to be able to fall 
>> back to the existing boot process rather then all the way to 
>> text-only mode.
>
> The idea behind the new boot process is to add graphics to the "text 
> mode", which is possible.
>
>>
>> I am still unclear on what you intend to do to the grub boot process. 
>> are you going to merge the new boot animation so that 
>> grub/kernel/service loading is all under one status screen? It 
>> definitely shouldn't be a hassle for a user to get to this menu.
>
> The idea behind the Grub change is pretty much as you see it today, 
> except, that instead of showing a graphic in the counter screen (the 
> screen you see with a Fedora 7 themed backdrop, etc) the counter would 
> be without a background extending the "look and feel" of the BIOS boot 
> process. Once the kernel loads, as soon it does, there's gonna be 
> graphics. Not EGA (16 color) graphics, like the Grub splash, but full 
> blown 32-bit images and animations. This doesn't mean that the X11 
> drivers are loaded (again, this is all in-kernel, no X!) which means 
> that even if your video card doesn't have proper X11 drivers for all 
> the fancy stuff (aka 3D), you can still get 2D, which is exactly what 
> will happen with the in-kernel graphics. There are a bunch of VESA 
> drivers in the kernel already. There are known problems when using the 
> Riva driver for the virtual terminal graphics and the nvidia X11 
> driver (nvidia recommends disabling the Riva driver or using the VESA 
> [vga] driver)
>
>>
>> All in all, It'd be nice to see that page have better explanations of 
>> the project's goals. Things like "there should be no text messages" 
>> should be elaborated; so users like me who joined the mailing list 
>> after the said discussion on this new boot process actually know what 
>> is going on.
>
> While many of the terms and even concepts may be a bit disorientating 
> at first, the page is quite clear actually (if you are familiar enough 
> with the boot process of Linux and the capabilities of the kernel). 
> Basic support for these graphics has been in the kernel for quite some 
> time now, back in the 2.4 days was the very first time I saw them 
> being used, and I don't know if the 2.2 series of kernels also had the 
> capability. That was when projects like BootSplash appeared. I gather 
> that BootSplash is no longer maintained, but still is the same basic 
> idea which is going into the F8 boot process. Take advantage of the 
> advanced graphics features of the kernel and use them during the boot 
> process, pretty much like it is with RHGB without the added overhead 
> of an early X11 session.
>
>>
>>
>> Thanks for elaborating on the projects goals.
>>
>> Brian
>