Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 8:45 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
Parent article: LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds

It should be possible to improve the look of the kernel boot without going to the lengths that Ubuntu or Fedora's splash screens do. The splash can use the console instead of a custom graphics setup, the graphic logo can be put there by the boot loader and left where it is, and if the boot is that fast, I'm sure no one will mind a "Starting [distro name]", dot, dot, dot instead of a progress bar. And of course that makes it easier to display any fatal messages without spoiling the general esthetics :) Non-fatal messages should not be shown on the console by default of course.

On a different subject, couldn't an initramdisk actually speed up booting from hard disk if done right - by just caching all the stuff which must be read to boot in a single file, which can be read with a single hard disk seek?

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 9:53 UTC (Tue) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (guest, #38022) [Link] (1 responses)

> Non-fatal messages should not be shown on the console by default of course.

Even if the only retribution the software writers ask for is a copyright line?
Even if the kernel is going to unsupported (tainted) mode loading a driver?
Anyways, it is a lost cause already.

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 10:04 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

Those things are hidden by bootsplashes even today. But even if they weren't, how do you get around the problem of several hundred lines of attributions and notifications going past in a few seconds? That will not help the people wanting recognition.

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 13:26 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (2 responses)

Putting everything in an initramdisk is really optimising for hard disks, which have slow random I/Os. SSDs don't have this problem, so it's better to find an optimisation that works for them too.

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 13:31 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

Wouldn't an alternative be to optimise for the system you are running on, assuming that on the whole it will not change much from one boot to the next? And if it does change, you use the slower fallback for that boot.

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 24, 2008 8:57 UTC (Wed) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

Hmmmm... Isn't that what Windows does, though without any very useful fallback when it fails?

Splash screens and initramdisk

Posted Sep 23, 2008 17:14 UTC (Tue) by s0f4r (guest, #52284) [Link]

Not really. The overhead of actually loading the ramdisk using the slowest read method (BIOS) the system has available is extremely expensive. Once the kernel is booted we can use the fastest methods to read the disk.