[OpenBIOS] Re: boy is EFI a kludge!

[Chris Maresca]

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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