Intel Could Finally Be Ready To Enable Fastboot By Default For Skylake & Newer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Could Finally Be Ready To Enable Fastboot By Default For Skylake & Newer

Going back seven years has been the Intel Linux graphics driver's "Fastboot" support for allowing a more polished initial boot experience by allowing unnecessary mode sets to be avoided by the hardware. There have been multiple attempts over the years to enable this cleaner boot experience by default, but each time it ended up being rejected or later reverted due to running into issues with problematic hardware. This year looks like we might finally see it enabled by default for Skylake HD/Iris Graphics and newer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Fastboot-Default-2019-Try

[willmore]

This seems a simple risk vs reward issue. What's the benefit of this working? Cosmetic graphical changes vs breaking display output for some systems. Yeah, that's going to be a hard sell. They're going to have to be pushing very well tested and reliable code that never fails if they want to get in something with such little actual benefit.

Edit: Hey, it's my 2^8th post!

[Britoid]

This seems a simple risk vs reward issue. What's the benefit of this working? Cosmetic graphical changes vs breaking display output for some systems. Yeah, that's going to be a hard sell. They're going to have to be pushing very well tested and reliable code that never fails if they want to get in something with such little actual benefit.

Edit: Hey, it's my 2^8th post!

Because I don't know about you, but having the mode set 3-4 times during a boot causing flickers seems stupid, pointless and to the user, untidy.

Other operating systems don't do it anymore, and Android does it in a very hardware specific way.


If Linux on the desktop is ever going to be a thing, the user with little tech experience needs to be able to turn on the computer for the first time and go wow.

[anarki2]

Good. One more thing we need to disable.

[anarki2]

Because I don't know about you, but having the mode set 3-4 times during a boot causing flickers seems stupid, pointless and to the user, untidy.

Other operating systems don't do it anymore, and Android does it in a very hardware specific way.


If Linux on the desktop is ever going to be a thing, the user with little tech experience needs to be able to turn on the computer for the first time and go wow.

Flickering isn't because lack of fast boot (it'd be called flickerfree boot then), it's because of buggy crap on all levels of the stack (kernel drivers, x drivers, x itself, mesa, the compositor, the login manager, and so on).

[willmore]

Because I don't know about you, but having the mode set 3-4 times during a boot causing flickers seems stupid, pointless and to the user, untidy.

Other operating systems don't do it anymore, and Android does it in a very hardware specific way.


If Linux on the desktop is ever going to be a thing, the user with little tech experience needs to be able to turn on the computer for the first time and go wow.

I don't care if it flickers a few times as long as it boots quickly and doesn't get stuck or crash because it tried to do some kind of fancy modesetting before it had an OS up.

Let's be clear on this, it takes a lot of code to get a display up and running. The BIOS/UEFI/uboot will have already done *something* and who knows what it chose? Here's an idea: how about the kernel doesn't mess with the video mode at all and just waits nicely for userspace to take care of things? Putting display setup code into the kernel just means that there's one more thing that needs to know how to mess with the display.

[cybertraveler]

I value this flicker-free boot experience. I think it will make my desktop experience more beautiful and elegant. It will be more of a pleasure to use my systems.

[Creak]

Is it something that might be ported to AMD cards in the future?

Linux is clearly better than 10 years ago, but it's not the only OS that evolved during this period. In order to be considered as a viable OS for anyone to use, this is the kind of attention to details that make heads turn.

[Britoid]

I don't care if it flickers a few times as long as it boots quickly and doesn't get stuck or crash because it tried to do some kind of fancy modesetting before it had an OS up.

Let's be clear on this, it takes a lot of code to get a display up and running. The BIOS/UEFI/uboot will have already done *something* and who knows what it chose? Here's an idea: how about the kernel doesn't mess with the video mode at all and just waits nicely for userspace to take care of things? Putting display setup code into the kernel just means that there's one more thing that needs to know how to mess with the display.

The kernel has to do something as it's the first thing that starts after the bootloader. Preferably the kernel should do something and userland should respect it and keep it if it agrees with it.

[willmore]

The kernel has to do something as it's the first thing that starts after the bootloader. Preferably the kernel should do something and userland should respect it and keep it if it agrees with it.

That's the thing, the user level desktop is the only place where they know the desired resolution. Unless there is a good mechanism to push that decision down to the kernel and the BIOS/UEFI/bootloader, then there's going to be some flicker as the resolution changes. If that's worked out, then that's great, but I don't think that's the situation. I have a cheap Win10 tablet that goes through several different resolutions as it boots.

All things being equal, yes, it would be nice to have no flashing as resolutions changed, but if it's any kind of tradeoff for stability or reliability, then flicker all you want, but leave me with a stable desktop (and quickly).