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Improving the Fedora Boot Experience
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a recent post on Red Hat senior interaction designer Máirín Duffy's blog with an illuminating look at Red Hat's design process, and how things like graphic elements, widget behavior, and bootup time are taken into account. It starts: "So I have this thing on my desk at Red Hat that basically defines a simple design process. (Yes, it also uses the word 'ideate' and yes, it sounds funny but it is a real word apparently!) While the mailing list thread on the topic at this point is high-volume and a bit chaotic, there is a lot of useful information and suggestions in there that I think could be pulled into a design process and sorted out. So I took 3 hours (yes, 3 hours) this morning to wade through the thread and attempt to do this."
The start up graphics is pointless, it is not interesting, nor does it tell you anything useful, and it just makes the boot process seem very slow.
One of the first things I do with a new fedora system is to disable the start up graphics, and display the boot up messages. So the boot process appears faster (may take exactly the same wall clock time, never measured it), and there is something at least vaguely interesting to look at. Plus, if it freezes for some reason, I've got some hint as to where the problem occurred.
Sure buddy; sounds like you're running XP. Fedora has well documented average time between kernel panics of 3.4 days.
If you are so keen on uptime to reboot only twice a year then you should be particularly interested in boot time, shortening the boot time could push you from 3 nines to 4!
I don't need security patches, I have McAfee.
I don't get all the hype about uptime.
My multi-media server easily gets five nines of uptime.
In fact, over 2012 it was way better than 9.9999% !
That's been taken care of by modern file systems.
Also, do you apply security patches to your kernel on-the-fly somehow, or how come you don't have to reboot?
What is this bait? I mean, really? Every damn time someone mentions uptime?
Fine. I'll bite.
It just needs to be fast IMHO.
Anyone else agree?
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
For instance, if you are on a system where kernel mode setting Isn't Quite There Yet, it is fairly likely that 'pretty' won't even be possible, just because of the amount of flailing between the BIOS and early boot mucking around in some legacy VGA mode, and then a bunch of flickering when things eventually get handed to X. It's not so much that anything terribly useful is directly made possible by being able to turn on the fancy a few seconds earlier; but signs of togetherness in the graphics drivers are generally a good thing.
Yep, that's why I ditched UEFI. Flashed my /boot/ right into the BIOS with Coreboot. Just as secure as UEFI if I want it to be, and the system literally boots instantly.
If 1 disk = 1 partition, then it would be possible. But if your 6 disks contain more than one partition, you will find out that your time savings per disks will be minimum, none or even negative.
Well I have commissioned at least 3 machines this century, where I had time to read the messages...
But even whizzing past at speed, like my latest machine with SSD, still beats looking at the fedora logo being filled in - IMHO! :-)
Most of the boot improvements created since then have done nothing but irritate the experienced users. Honestly, I wish some of the "improvements" to GUIs were undone too.
This
To bad it's AC or I would have spent a mod point on it. There is nothing more scary to a non techie than the boot/kernel puking garbage on the screen. And there is no end to the [what's-it-telling-me-now? | should-I-worry? | what-is-it-counting-up/down-for?] support [calls | yells | screams | cries | sobbing].
Pretty is step 2 of making it onto the everyday consumer's PC. Step 1 would be "just works".
... whatever
.
You are exactly right. The original Mac OSX boot-up experience is a nice clean boot up screen with a few simple small icons flying by. The original Mac OS7 OS8 and OS9 bootups have a happy mac icon centered on the screen and the small icons for the addons on the bottom of the screen.
.
Linux boot-ups should have a simple graphical or text based boot up that says just a very few simple things: booting up
checking drives
starting network
starting graphics
tada!
and allow for the user to hit one of the function keys or a space bar or something to allow for viewing of the detailed boot-up log. Most people don't really need to see all of the details and would certainly be scared by all of the words and labels that they might not understand. This is one area where OSX actually does a better job.
What kind of acceleration do you think you need for non-antialiased, fixed-width text? A bitblt might speed it up in a framebuffer console, but these days memcpy on the CPU is faster, which is why X11 won't use hardware bitblt anymore. On x86, however, the hardware / BIOS provides a text console, and the GPU is free to accelerate it however it wishes. Given that the XT could scroll text faster than the kernel boot messages appear, I doubt this is a bottleneck on any vaguely modern system. You'll get more slowdown from lock contention around the kernel's version of printf than you will from outputting the result to the screen.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Seriously, can we stop referring to booting a computer as an "experience"? It's not like it's a trip to the moon!
Sent from my Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2).
Booting Fedora is an "experience"? Who knew?
Naw, that's not an experience. An experience is being high on some sticky purple bud and driving a Lamborghini Gallardo on the Pacific Coast Highway with CHP on your tail and $7.5million in stolen money in a backpack on the seat next to you and busting through a guard rail, getting thrown 70 feet from the car and watching the Gallardo burst into a fireball while you realize you were only scratched and you somehow grabbed the backpack when you were thrown from the car. And now the police and the guys you stole the money from and your wife all think you're dead.
Now THAT'S an experience. Booting Fedora is not an experience.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You can adjust that check frequency setting, 180 days is merely the default. But unless you can schedule to take the file-systems off-line, or put them in read-only mode and run an appropriate "fsck" on them before re-establishing write permission, this is actually a very good idea. There's nothing like the beginning of a disk problem being missed, or a file system corruption tied to a particular bad kernel, to leave a critical system in an unrecoverable state.
For whatever group I work with, whether my own colleages or a business partner, I do try to schedule a reboot of *everything*, and a reboot at least once a year, to make sure that backups are done and tested and all the hardware will reboot successfully when the experts are _not_ available. You might be _amazed_ at the numer of servers described as "it just works" which failed on reboot, and failover systems and redundant connections that were _not_ failing over properly and were _not_ redundant.
Except nobody wants to listen to our complaints? I don't want systemd or wayland. But they're going to be forced on us. And I'll be expected to support them.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
What motherboard are you using ?
Remove "rhgb" and "quiet" from the kernel boot line. Fixed.
Not everyone boots their systems "maybe twice a year." Hell, I leave my system running 24/7 and even I reboot a fair number of times more than that. Even if someone reboots for nothing more than kernel updates and otherwise never shuts down, they'll probably still reboot more than twice.
That said... while I see why they might want to "polish" the boot process and speed it up, I'm still not really sure it's worth it. Whenever I hear about "improving" the boot screen, I fear removing all the information displayed with a pretty picture. Many distributions have already done that... the next step is disabling F2/ESC. But hey, who cares as long as it looks pretty and its animation is smooth as liquid? And Fedora is just the kind of distro that I would expect do something like that, due to their attempts to be "user friendly" as a top priority.
long uptimes...
I saw this argument in another thread. If you have a modern machine with long uptimes, it means your probably not up ot the latest patch.
I generally reboot my server only when systemd(init), or the kernel is upgraded
Thats about once every two weeks to a month TOPS. I wouldn't brag about having an unpatched machine.
They already did the best thing they could....
systemd. I know many people don't like it, but its awesome. It makes reboots on servers that much faster, cutting the boot time around half from sysvinit, and making the shut off time under 3 seconds.
in addition, it replaces polkit, and intergrates with acpid, and udev, making it very very solid in keeping track of programs and hardware. None of the glitchyness or sluggesness of initscripts. No more relying on bash scripts to keep track of things like PIDs.
very eligant modern solution for replacing init with a v
also replacing consolekit was probably the best thing to happen to linux since HAL was obsoleted by added udev funcitonaility.
Its very un-UNIX like, but it gives the boot proccess and daemon handling a very very professional unfied method, and speed/agility that linux needs to compete with windows and mac.