Fedora 8 Boot Process

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

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