[syslinux] New 'quiet' behavior - optional?

Gene Cumm gene.cumm at gmail.com
Wed Nov 24 13:59:13 PST 2010


On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 19:23, Lucas De Marchi
<lucas.demarchi at profusion.mobi> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu> wrote:
>>> When I see these messages by a fraction of a second (not specifically
>>> in syslinux), I always hear users complaining that the system as a
>>> whole is not well integrated, there are still some rough edges to be
>>> polished. The reason is that it appears and goes away faster than the
>>> user is able to read and slower than necessary to be unnoticed.
>>
>> How does the user know that it isn't part of the system BIOS?
>
> Ideally the bios doesn't show anything if configuration didn't change
> since last time the computer was booted (an example of this behavior
> is the Asus eeepc).
>
> Even if BIOS shows something, the common behavior is to blank the
> screen before going to the boot loader. The final result is that
> screen is blanked between BIOS and bootloader and then between the
> banner and the graphical UI. If there isn't anything written in the
> banner, then there's one less blanking.

Most option ROMs I've seen don't bother with blanking.  Storage
controllers (Especially Intel Rapid Restore and AHCI on current
desktops and laptops) and PXE ROMs are the most common ones my users
would see.  I also see a bunch of other option ROMs on more populated
systems, especially servers.

With most of these machines, the BIOS blanks the screen then the
option ROMs load, populating the screen with text, then the bootloader
loads.  If the option ROMs didn't load (disabled in BIOS; for
desktop/laptop storage controllers that often means legacy storage
mode), a blank screen would be the result when proceeding to the
bootloader.

One idea to make it look "nicer" might be a config directive like
"UIDELAY", measured in 1/10ths of a second like the timeouts but such
a feature request would be far easier to implement once the config
parser is changed over to C.  When used, it could display a message
like "Loading user interface, please wait..." (maybe another directive
"UIDELAYMSG").  It would eliminate the flash causing "rough edges"
such that users could read the message.  This delay/message would
solely be used at first load and not subsequent loads of the UI within
one session in Syslinux.

-- 
-Gene




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