Reordering the boot for fun and profit [LWN.net]

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 14:19 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Reordering the boot for fun and profit by alankila
Parent article: Reordering the boot for fun and profit

What about letting a console application, i.e. the bootsplash, register for notifications if
it wishes to (this should be possible now)?  And if no application is currently registered for
notifications, simply write to a log and take the most conservative decision possible?  One of
the things which I slightly dislike about all this new udev/hal/etc infrastructure is that it
is all so graphically oriented, although there is no intrinsic reason for it.  It would be so
nice for X11 and the command line to be equally privileged citizens (in fact, more often than
not the command line is still the privileged one).

(Log in to post comments)

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 14:58 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

Possible. You are right in that the splash probably already could deliver notifications. On
the other hand, why not just start X instead?

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 19:59 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

udev, graphically oriented? WTF? It's purely-textual, doesn't link with X, 
and as far as I know there are no X tools that talk to it. It *is* quite 
hotplug-oriented, but that's sort of its raison d'etre...

It's true that hal/dbus is sort of graphically oriented, in that there is 
a per-X-session message bus; but more than that hal itself is distribution 
oriented, with the maintainers brushing off or ignoring outright segfaults 
if you're not running a binary packaged by a major distro. Given that hal 
runs as root, this is more than slightly disturbing.

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 19, 2008 13:29 UTC (Sat) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Point taken regarding udev.  Regarding the rest though, I would certainly appreciate say my
CDs being automounted when X is not currently running.

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 24, 2008 10:54 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I do that with udev :) (ejecting on unmount is probably doable too, but I haven't looked at
it. umounting on eject I haven't looked at, as without revoke() it's never going to work
reliably.)