Faster login

[David Zeuthen]

On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 19:58 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> IIRC the reason we did rhgb with X is that the kernel guys couldn't come
> up with any other approach that they would accept (or at least any other
> that they would accept and that was feasible to implement)
> 
> But yeah, with these gdm results rhgb is looking like a bad idea to me;
> as soon as we can get up rhgb, we could get up gdm, and so we may as
> well jump straight to gdm and possibly extend gdm to display boot
> progress/errors.
> 
> It might still be useful to get a non-X graphical display up earlier,
> before gdm/rhgb can start, though. Depending on how quickly we can get
> gdm up after a couple solid rounds of hacking on the boot time problem.
> 

I just had a look at http://www.bootsplash.org/ and it appears that
these patches do a lot of configurable stuff insofar that one needs to
store the configuration and graphical assets in the initrd. This, IMO,
pretty much defeats the purpose since it takes time for the kernel to
boot (slightly more than 10 secs right now). I'm not sure the assets can
be built into the kernel instead of using the initrd.

Ideally, IMO, all we need is a screen with a solid background colour
(say, the same colour as in the gdm default theme) along with a small
logo (e.g. a Red Fedora) and perhaps the twirling animation from rhgb.
I'm pretty sure we don't need any progress bar and textual messages as
we want gdm to appear within 10-20 seconds anyway (cf. my initial mail
it's 43 seconds with my hack and 85 without the hack).

So, in fact, if I boot my laptop with the kernel option vga=0x0317
(1024x768x24), then right after grub, I get the Tux log in the top along
with scrolling kernel messages. Almost there..

So, I wonder how much work there is in taking a static background colour
along with a centered logo, disable the messages from the kernel and
make the animation.. animate. I also wonder if something like this could
be accepted into the upstream kernel.

Obviously, said assets (Fedora logo, animations etc.) will need to be
compiled into the kernel proper as we need them before the initrd but,
hey, everything has a price (the tux logo is already in there, so..). We
would probably also need to select a more safe resolution e.g. max
800x600x256 or something in order to not destroy any monitors out there.

Cheers,
David