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
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