No Plymouth Coming To Ubuntu 9.10

[Sarvatt]

Why do people even bother suggesting a text boot? It isn't going to ever happen since they want to look like a professional distribution, not some hack job. Also they are targeting new users that would be scared to see text fly at them, especially when failures pop up every now and then. Last dell doesn't want calls related to users being scared or seeing an error message during boot, which you would probably see in text boot.

They were talking about silencing the whole boot process (including grub) until X and working towards getting X started fast enough to display stuff. There were some major changes/ideas going around from the notes from UDS that are up on gobby, I've cut and pasted a few relevant/interesting ones here

http://sarvatt.com/downloads/karmicgobby.txt

[sc3252]

Why do people even bother suggesting a text boot? It isn't going to ever happen since they want to look like a professional distribution, not some hack job. Also they are targeting new users that would be scared to see text fly at them, especially when failures pop up every now and then. Last dell doesn't want calls related to users being scared or seeing an error message during boot, which you would probably see in text boot.

[frische]

which would be fast enough, if that one read was a sequential read of all the data needed for booting....

[kxmas]

I don't believe there's any technical reason for a graphical boot to take longer than a text boot.

Nothing is free. You can not get around the fact that another program to load and execute will take some time. You can't get around the fact that the image data must be loaded and processed as well.

Things can be executed in parallel to minimize the damage, but on most computers, the disk is the bottle neck and not capable of doing more that one reads operation at a time.

[Vadi]

Great decision.

[val-gaav]

That's a good decision ...

Ask anyone what he would prefer a nice graphical boot or shorter boot and the answer should be obvious for most people

[unix_epoch]

I don't believe there's any technical reason for a graphical boot to take longer than a text boot. The people designing the graphical boot simply need to know how to optimize what they're doing instead of just relying on faster hardware or an accelerated video card (something that isn't too common in free software outside of the video apps and libraries like mplayer and ffmpeg, and perhaps the most popular X11 drivers).

I wrote some applications for the Linux framebuffer a long time ago (including a boot splash that never got released), and in my testing, on a ~200MHz CPU (IIRC), with a plain PCI video card, I was able to push over 30fps full screen to a 1024x768 screen (that's about 68MB/s with packed 24-bit pixels, which was the bandwidth limit of the video card, not a CPU limit). A boot splash doesn't have to draw to the entire screen, and doesn't have to load a bunch of large graphics files from the drive (if they design it right). I haven't used Plymouth (I mostly use Debian derivatives and Gentoo), but my guess is that its bottleneck is either a lack of I/O optimization (reading too much fragmented data from disk) or not-yet-optimized processor and video resource usage, not an inherent failure of the concept of a graphical boot splash.

[trepo]

Boot times

Considering that text boot takes roughly the same amount of time (seriously) as the usplash or any of the other modes seem to (The time doesn't come from doing pretty things to the screen or just raw text- it comes from the operations being done to generate either, which have traditionally been done serially throughout the boot up, when there's quite a few things that could have been done in parallel...) your remark isn't actually helpful...

This might not be true in all cases. Got an EEE recently and (for obvious reasons) I decided to replace the sys that came with it. With my own, largely based on LFS-stable but deviating from it when I thought appropriate. Got Plymouth running nicely, but...
As I said I deviated from the official LFS quite a bit, writing custom bootscripts among other things, resulting in an ~8 sec boot time (GRUB to SLIM). Plymouth added 5 secs to that boot time, so I ditched it and went without bootsplash. I'm quite sure that on a recent multicore desktop that delay would be significantly shorter (not crazy enough to risk hosing my main machine, so no experience with that), but it _is_ a delay in this case. (Well, yes, I might have just misconfig'd stuff.)

EDIT: Or might have just misunderstood

[DanL]

Considering that text boot takes roughly the same amount of time (seriously) as the usplash

The bootcharts I've seen tell a different story, and when boot times get that low, 1s is significant, so maybe my remark was more "helpful" than you think

[Sarvatt]

they will not get their 10 second goal
that's ridiculous

15 seconds on a dell mini 9 was the new goal from what I heard.