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
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