StreamlinedBoot

Revision 14 as of 2006-02-09 02:02:53

Clear message

Summary

Identify what we're actually doing during boot up, and decide what we actually need to be doing and drop (or move) anything we don't; regroup the boot sequence into clear targets ("hardware detection", "console setup", "filesystem checking and mounting", etc.).

Rationale

Use cases

Scope

Design

A good idea would be to do this like the KDE and Gnome splash screens. But instead of using icons, we'd use flashing text on Usplash and the progress bar to show the boot progress.

attachment:streamlinesplash.gif

Interactivity

The percieved time-to-boot is the time from pushing the power button till the user can interact with the system for his/her most frequent tasks. Can we reorder the boot targets to shorten the percieved time-to-boot? Consider showing the login screen (terminal or graphical) before starting programs like hplip, cupsys, makedev, sshd, powernowd, rsync, openafs, cron, anacron, atd, binfmt-support, alsa, apmd, bluez-utils, fetchmail and acpi-support, and suspending their startup while the basic interactive environment (terminal or desktop) is being set up. -PhilipGanchev

The Canon Cat (designed by Jef Raskin) even displayed a graphical image at bootup of the system as it was when the user logged out, so that the user percieved an almost-instant boot, and could recall what he/she was doing. -PhilipGanchev

State Recovery

It is also important to improve the recovery of the environment (desktop) to the state it was in when the user logged in. I realize that this is largely a Gnome issue, but we can discuss with Gnome. -PhilipGanchev

Currently, Firefox sessions are not saved, and so Gnome asks before killing them, which complicates the process of logging out. I suggest that Firefox be shipped with the SessionSaver extension. -PhilipGanchev

Could terminal emulators be made to recover their history and output? -PhilipGanchev

Implementation

The best idea would be to make Usplash only draw those multiple strings, but then code in a system that still works with our output system for the current Usplash, making Usplash flash different text based off coded triggers in the Usplash code.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

Bug comparing Breezy to Mandriva's boot speed: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/boot/+bug/3485

BoF agenda and discussion

viper550: Why not do this like the KDE splash screen, this might be a feasable approach to this idea.

CategorySpec