Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 10:50:01 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Cc: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert), brandon@glacier.cold.org, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: splash-page on bootup.. Message-ID: <199609221650.KAA07455@rover.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 22 Sep 1996 09:57:34 CDT." <199609221457.JAA14843@brasil.moneng.mei.com> References: <199609221457.JAA14843@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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In message <199609221457.JAA14843@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Joe Greco writes: : If you have the appropriate graphics depth available, _maybe_... can't : remember enough about PC graphics to figure out if normal VGA is 16 or 256 : colors.. 16 obviously would not fly. Hmmm, I think that turning the background blue or some other pleasing color would go a long way toward making people like the boot process more. :-) :-) I think that animiation would be silly in this context, and you certainly won't get smooth animation. However, a kernel that has had its configuration recorded should know fairly well how many devices it is going to generally have and you should be able to have a status meter (sometimes called a gauge) that indicates %probed. Call that 1/2 the boot time, and the rest of the system coming up the rest. However, this is sounding like it will be more expensive than it is worth in terms of space. A decent gif will run 20-30k, plus you have the overhead of programming the graphics cards into graphics mode. Then how do you take them out of graphics mode, or do you just start X up, and can X handle it and and and. It is a big job.... In the past I've had trouble, btw, starting X up early in the boot sequence. I've tried to start up xdm and my X server right before the fsck, right after and right after the mounts. Even after the mounts, I've had strange problems with old versions hanging. Maybe they have been fixed since I tried in about three major revs of XFree86 ago (2.1 sticks in my head, but it was 2+ years ago). Maybe the best idea would be to have a -q mode that boots quietly so that you can do the blue screen trick, and then a little later start up X windows and see very little in the way of booting junk. After all, what NT does it turn the screen blue, print a terse message that says it is coming up, then starts Windows as soon as it is able, and then continues bringing up the rest of the system. I seem to recall that one of its loader stages does this. Warner
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