Plymouth Packages For Ubuntu Are Now Available

[elanthis]

I bet it would be very easy to have GRUB to ask for username and password.

All GRUB would have to do, is to compare if the hash match with the one in /etc/passwd.

Not if you want localized usernames, user icons, session selection, keyboard selection, etc.

[mgc8]

I'm tired of people blaming the hard drive. Yes, the hard drive is slow and prolli keeping us from a 10 second boot. But we are at 30 seconds right now, which according to my boot chart appears CPU bound.

Take a laptop that boots in over 1min. Swap the HDD with a SSD. Boot time is reduced to around 30sec. QED (and yes, I didn't just read about this, I actually did it. SSD's do have their problems, but they do wonders for read-only random-access patterns).
When you are down to around 30sec, the processor and wait times inside various applications (like waiting for the USB bus to initialize) take most of the time. But that's about the lowest we get without sacrificing functionality (like in the intel experiment). Sure it can be (and should be) improved, but all I was saying was that moving xDM around is not the solution.

Quotation needed. Because, sorry to put it like this, the number is bullshit.

This is not a scientific paper. Not even Wikipedia for that matter. If you want "facts" go find them yourself. Otherwise all we're talking about here is anecdotal evidence (just like your example below). Mine happens to come from several (more than 20) computers I work with on a daily basis, with distributions ranging from stock Debian and Ubuntu to highly customized Slackware. Sorry I didn't consider writing a thesis about them...

I use archlinux and load all services bar hal in the background (hal is needed for input with evdev). Boot time with background services: 15 seconds; without: ~26 seconds. The system is usable immediately after login in both cases (install an archlinux virtual machine and try it, if you don't believe me).

That simply depends on so many factors it's just not funny. What does "usable immediately" mean? Can you open FF and go to "localhost/phpmyadmin" and run an SQL query? How much does it take from the moment you click the FF icon? If by "useable" it means you can open a terminal and run 'ls' then sure, it's useable. What about going to 'google.com'? Somehow I doubt you can do that before the network initializes, so you'll still have to wait the necessary seconds before your network is up.

Most people actually use more than simply a browser and IM client -- if it were so, then SplashTop would've been enough for everbody. What about NFS (or FUSE or SAMBA or whatever) shares that need to be mounted?

If you don't need any of those things you can simply disable them from loading at boot, and only start them when necessary -- now that's saving up time for sure. I never said a faster boot wasn't desireable or indeed possible, all I'm saying is that moving xDM at the start is not the right solution, as it just switches waiting time around. You still wait, you just have a desktop instead of a bare splsh to look at.

Heck, I dont even care if the default is to hold off GDM until everything is loaded (parallell boot should still cut it down significantly), but I would like to have the possibility to let me start typing the password earlier, if i want to. Upstart or launchD both have many other positive things as well (restarting processes and such). I want it so badly.

Well, you do know that you can do that alreay if you really want to? Nobody is stopping you from installing upstart and fiddling with the boot sequence. Check this out for even more modifications you can make to have things boot-up faster. Sure, there are compromises, but if what you are after is sheer speed, nobody is stopping you to do it.

But what you actually imply is that you want this to be the default. Sorry, that involves other people as well, and you need to take their needs into account. The good news is that it's being worked on.

How do you think Grub loads /etc/grub.conf now?

Frankly I believe Grub reading the FS directly is a kludgy solution even for that. Right now it limits the partition choices to a few -- sure, not really a problem for /boot, but it does become a problem if we're talking about / .
What about encryption? Right now in order to boot an encrypted system you use a plain /boot for Grub and then the kernel takes over. What if / is on a USB device? Or, even worse, over the network? It can be done, but not without making Grub unnecessarily complex... that's why I mentioned LinuxBIOS, a much more interesting and viable alternative IMO.

[AliBaba]

@mgc8:
Full and complete ack - everything I could have said and far beyond.

[curaga]

To everyone who wanted Grub to ask for passwords - Why?
If you just don't start Gdm and X automatically, even *buntu should show you a normal text login, and it should be shown a few secs earlier than gdm due to X and gdm wait. If you then have startx in your .profile, it's very similar to what you wrote and been possible for a long time.

I also agree about shoving the services after login is the wrong way to go. Windows is the worst case, but who wants to be even near that, for example on lower hardware.

Oh, and for the boot fanatics (yes I'm one myself ), my sysv-based os boots in around 12 secs from grub to login prompt, with nfs, cron, and sshd started. Everything needed running.

[Micket]

So upstart has several advantages (or launchd, which i dont know to much about). Just see the first page on http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
This is what I care about most, as i rarely reboot.
But let's put those to the side, I shall just concentrate on the booting concept alone with this reply.

That simply depends on so many factors it's just not funny. What does "usable immediately" mean? Can you open FF and go to "localhost/phpmyadmin" and run an SQL query? How much does it take from the moment you click the FF icon? If by "useable" it means you can open a terminal and run 'ls' then sure, it's useable. What about going to 'google.com'? Somehow I doubt you can do that before the network initializes, so you'll still have to wait the necessary seconds before your network is up.

Most people actually use more than simply a browser and IM client -- if it were so, then SplashTop would've been enough for everbody. What about NFS (or FUSE or SAMBA or whatever) shares that need to be mounted?

Not the slighest problem for a piece of software that can handle dependencies between services. The login process would simply depend on network connection, and I certainly don't mind of such setting would be default (I would probably want that myself, and turn it off if I really didn't care).

And in this case. I bet that at the time his mouse reached the browser icon, the network card was already up and running if not even earlier, before the desktop finished loading (and so on for every other service he uses).
In fact, this kind of behaviour is default on many computers, like everyone who uses Gnome NetworkManager. It does this faster than I can launch the browser, and i've never noticed the CPU-load of connecting to a wireless network (no frozen desktop here... how strange!).
You reply as if you were sure he lied and in reality it wasn't fully useable at all. If we are going to go by anecdotal experiences in this discussion, why debunk his reply?

If you don't need any of those things you can simply disable them from loading at boot, and only start them when necessary -- now that's saving up time for sure. I never said a faster boot wasn't desireable or indeed possible, all I'm saying is that moving xDM at the start is not the right solution, as it just switches waiting time around. You still wait, you just have a desktop instead of a bare splsh to look at.

You make it sound like we are all suggesting that we should slam xDM first in the boot process.

1. It's not a matter of slamming the login screen before ANY services and keeping SysV as is. Many services are suitable to be started before login is allowed.

And it would be faster because I could type in my password at the same time as a few non-critical services are starting, instead of forcing me to wait until some external drive is mounting or whatnot. Just taking another step to allow for parallel user IO.
And if I didn't hurry and type it in it could just continue to load the rest of the services (unless those depend on the Xserver of course), and you'll have a situation exactly like the one we got today.
Or if i'm really quick at typing, then my external drive will just have to mount while my window manager is starting up.

Well, you do know that you can do that alreay if you really want to? Nobody is stopping you from installing upstart and fiddling with the boot sequence. Check this out for even more modifications you can make to have things boot-up faster. Sure, there are compromises, but if what you are after is sheer speed, nobody is stopping you to do it.

But what you actually imply is that you want this to be the default. Sorry, that involves other people as well, and you need to take their needs into account. The good news is that it's being worked on.

Yes because the current default is completely sequential. I definitely imply that this default should be changed and I'm definitely not just thinking about myself.

I dont even really care that much about when the password box pops up. I just dislike the fact that I have to wait for my external harddrive to settle.. then my IP-address for my network card.. then for my wireless card.. and a bunch of other things that are embarrasingly parallell.

Yes, i know very well about those pages, and how you can trim it down (with mostly ugly hacks), but if I dont break anything when i do it (the risk is very high) then it'll surely eventually break in some future system upgrade. Nobody is stopping you to do anything, but they aren't helping you either.

Upstart might not be ready right now, but if developement is pushed forward, I'm convincecd that it'll make things better for EVERYONE.
The login service would simply depend on.. well everything it needs!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReplacementInitscripts

This page has a huge figure with dependencies.
Just let xDM popup whenever it's dependencies are fullfilled, and you can start typing.

This doesn't mean it'll "be like WinXP". It doesn't even need to show you the desktop before everything is 100% complete (but waiting for noncritical, non CPU-heavy processes to show the desktop is ridicolous).
But why is it such a GREAT thing to force the user to wait with the password? I just dont see it.