On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Gavin Robert Brewer wrote:
There was a post on /. today about a BIOS that boots in .8 sec. That seems to be pretty good... Now all we need to do is speed up linux boot...
There is a lot of spam during linux bootup that strikes me as gratuitous techie garbage. It would be better to find a way of booting directly into the OpenWindows or some such.
Er, that would be really bad on a server. What I really want is to boot to serial console, then initialize the graphics card if it exists.
Not wishing to be negative, but I would really like to ask Linus as to why he chose to have all that spam redirected to the screen at bootup. It is'nt very eyecatching.
He's already complained about it, mostly about all the sigs and self-promotion. BUT, would rather have that than not know what's going on, ala windows & mac...
BTW, one of the advantages of living in Silicon Valley is that there are a number of Linux gurus living around here... Linus regularly attends SVLUG and BALUG meetings. He would have been at Linux10, but he's on vacation in Finland right now...
We can get around this by hand-coding in some basic graphics primitives. Award BIOS managed to do it with the famous 'Energy Saver' trademark we all see when we power up our PC's...so it must be possible for our coders to capitalise on this kind of 'instant graphics'.
Hhmmm, that's just gratuitous eye candy, no? Besides, it's pretty trivial to replace those graphics with logos or other stuff. I think that doing things that are new and usefull (like serial consoles) would really help get people and hardware manufacturers interested. Imagine being able to run a server farm with no graphics cards, just a serial console and ethernet...
Chris.
-- chris maresca internet systems architect -- www.chrismaresca.com
"linux, only up 138 days, because california has flaky power... "
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