On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 15:47 +0100, Jan Dvořák wrote: > As have already been mentioned before, POSTing server takes so long > that GRUB delay is hardly noticeable. But what is worse, if you miss > the kernel selection dialog on a server, you look at UP TO FIVE MORE > MINUTES of waiting for the damn thing before you get another attempt. IMO that one's actually solvable to an extent (in theory at least and not always to a 100% correct but good enough): The boot loader (GRUB2, gummiboot, ..., I don't care) stores the booted OS (as in e.g. "Fedora $version", "Windows $version", ...) in a short list (of say 2 ~ 5 items) and the timestamp of booting somewhere it can read it. If being rebooted (as opposed to being shut down), the OS (systemd probably but I don't really care) writes the current HW clock timestamp very late in the reboot process somewhere else the boot loader can read it. A timeout is enabled or extended appropriately if: - the user rebooted into different OSs in the last 2 ~ 5 times because the user seems to want multi-booting, or if - the time of previous boot is not long enough in the past because there might be a problem with the boot attempt (give the user a chance to boot something else, mess with the boot parameters, ...), or if - the "time of shutdown before reboot" is older than a certain threshold, because this indicates a BIOS with a very long POST (to help users not miss the opportunity to influence what is booted and how) Otherwise, no or a short timeout is used. I'm sure finding the best thresholds, length of the list etc. needs some experimenting, but besides that I don't see a glaring error with this idea. What do you think? Nils -- Nils Philippsen "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase Red Hat a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nils@xxxxxxxxxx nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 PGP fingerprint: C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F 656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011 -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
