Red Hat Developing Early Login with gdm

hey writes "Red Hat has been working on early login because, among other reasons, 'If we start GDM sooner, the system will "feel" faster because the user will see a login screen sooner.' Very cool."

Comments

Just so long as...

[wowbagger]

Just so long as they hold to this one principle:


If you show me a login prompt, you'd damn well better be ready for me to log in.


I don't like the statement "We can allow the user to input their name and password, so long as we don't process it until the system is stable."

BZZZT! WRONG ANSWER!

I don't mind bringing up X, and showing the boot process info, but do NOT give me a prompt for my username until you are ready for me to log in.

Personally, I think the whole way init works needs to be revisted - it would be better if you could start all the init processes at once, with each having its standard input, output, and error going into init. If startup script FOO requires service BAR to be active before it proceeds, then BAR ought to provide a means for FOO to check if BAR is ready (and block if not).

init would then display the different output streams "as needed" (if an init script runs to a successful completion then who cares to see the output - ideally only if anything appears on stderr would init show the messages from a script), and would allow the administrator to interact with a failing init script as needed.