Fedora 29 Succeeds At Flicker-Free Boot Experience On Intel Hardware

[lsatenstein]

I am not as excited. The new Grub is incompatible with the grub support in Fedora28, Majaro, and other grub based distributions.
If Fedora 28 is on sda and F29 is on sdb, the grub.cfg on the sda device will crash if you try to boot the F29 entries.
The converse is not true. Fedora grub developers forgot that they still support F27 for a few more days) and F28

[horizonbrave]

I've actually have heaps of flickering when my Dell Precision M6700 (with a discrete Radeon Firepro GPU) resume from suspend (Fedora 28).. it almost cause me epilepsy!

[slalomsk8er]

But as for drawing a hint about this, nope sorry. There are 2 reasons why there are no plans to draw a hint:

1. It is ugly, all modern machines are moving away from showing messages like "Press F2 to enter setup, etc."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Again, who makes the decision on this?

2. Such messages are currently very much based on an everyone speaks English approach. Which simply is wrong, so this would require internationalization support in the bootloader. Currently we simply use the EFI text protocol. Proper internationalization support including e.g . Arabic and Asian languages would mean adding graphics support + a full font rendering stack + at least 20 different fonts to get full unicode coverage... Grub has support for drawing a graphic menu, but this is based on bitmap fonts which simply don't cut it for full internationalization.

Why is it simply wrong?
I'm not an native English speaker and I'm totally OK if English get's used for such things.
English is the lingua franca of computers and programming so why not?
To me internationalization is great but I switch back to English anyway to get more hits in my searches and don't need to translate messages and options to post in English forums. Just use English until all parts are in place to use unicode.
Again, who makes the decision on this?

Right, as mentioned in my blog one of the TODO-s is a new plymouth theme based on the current plymouth spinner theme which draws the spinner form the spinner theme over the existing background. I agree that we need some visual feedback here that you're past the bootloader and something is happening. You will be able ot press ESC as soon as the spinner shows to get details on the various services being started.

Why show the mainboard vendors logo at all?
just draw over the whole thing!
I just don't get it, hints to access options are supposedly ugly but vendor logos are not?!
What happens if your spinner clashes with the color of the vendor logo?
Again, is it possible to use an alpha channel to transition smoothly?

[hansdegoede]

So I'm a big fan of hinting at a button and be able to change access the GRUB menu and switch to verbose at run time.

You can still get to the grub menu by keeping shift pressed, or by pressing ESC, or by pressing F8, we delibrately have multiple options here, ESC is the grub default, keep shift pressed is done by Ubuntu (but only on BIOS boot, we extended it to also cover UEFi boots) and F8 used to be used by Windows. So we are trying to make this as discoverable as possible.

But as for drawing a hint about this, nope sorry. There are 2 reasons why there are no plans to draw a hint:

1. It is ugly, all modern machines are moving away from showing messages like "Press F2 to enter setup, etc."

2. Such messages are currently very much based on an everyone speaks English approach. Which simply is wrong, so this would require internationalization support in the bootloader. Currently we simply use the EFI text protocol. Proper internationalization support including e.g . Arabic and Asian languages would mean adding graphics support + a full font rendering stack + at least 20 different fonts to get full unicode coverage... Grub has support for drawing a graphic menu, but this is based on bitmap fonts which simply don't cut it for full internationalization.

I Think it would be appropriate to draw over the vendor logo anyway to tell the user that the computer isn't stuck but booting the OS.
Because my first impression of your video was that the computer is stuck for a long time and suddenly presents the login.

Right, as mentioned in my blog one of the TODO-s is a new plymouth theme based on the current plymouth spinner theme which draws the spinner form the spinner theme over the existing background. I agree that we need some visual feedback here that you're past the bootloader and something is happening. You will be able ot press ESC as soon as the spinner shows to get details on the various services being started.

[starshipeleven]

uefi/bios logo displayed so long, I thought the machine was hung. I don't see how this improves anyone's life.

Windows displays the loading "spinning wheeel animation" under the mobo/OEM logo, I hope that is the final goal of this endeavor. hansdegoede

[slalomsk8er]

I see a lot of people adding comments here about them being worried that this removes their ability to see under the hood. This is not true, we are well aware that some people prefer to see the boot messages and being able to do so is also very important from an educational pov.

You can still remove "quiet" and "rhgb" from the kernel commandline and get all the kernel and services startup messages as before. I think the notion of a boot splash and the quiet option was first introduced more then 10 years ago and we've always supported getting the full messages by simply removing these 2 options from the kernel commandline and there are no plans to change this.

As far as I remember, 10 years ago you didn't need to change the kernel command line in the GRUB menu. I was told by the quiet splash how to switch to verbose by pressing a key.
GRUB told me to press ESC to show the menu in quiet mode. I didn't need to change the config.

This is the cultural shift I talk about: getting told how to see the details and access the complicated options or having to research on the web to get the information.
Having a button to press versus having to muck about in configurations.

If you don't have a second computer you maybe out of luck.
As Candy stated, there can be bugs that crash the boot process without GRUB noticing and then you are stuck and can't access the GRUB menu.
Again, you are stuck without a second computer to create a boot stick and chroot into the broken system to change the GRUB configuration.

So I'm a big fan of hinting at a button and be able to change access the GRUB menu and switch to verbose at run time.
If it's possible to draw with a alpha channel, this hints can be drawn over the vendor logo without jarring effects. So one could have both, a flicker free boot and access to the GRUB menu and the verbose boot splash theme.

hansdegoede : Are there technical problems that make this impossible? What are the limitations? Who makes the decisions about design and features, you a design comity or your boss? I'm willing to invest some of my time to help making this as beautiful, easy and feature rich as possible.

I Think it would be appropriate to draw over the vendor logo anyway to tell the user that the computer isn't stuck but booting the OS.
Because my first impression of your video was that the computer is stuck for a long time and suddenly presents the login.

[starshipeleven]

Are you on a MSI motherboard? If so you can enable "WHQL Support" and it will do.

What about 30 bpp or 40 bpp?

Most other motherboards have similar options, Asrock calls it "HD BIOS" or something like that.

And yeah, the board sends an appropriately scaled image on my 4k, it's not like my older mobo that has max res of like 4:3 fullHD so it looks like shit on boot if you use a 4k.

[tildearrow]

But can it boot in 4K resolution?
Can it boot in 24 bpp or 32 bpp?

Are you on a MSI motherboard? If so you can enable "WHQL Support" and it will do.

What about 30 bpp or 40 bpp?

[starshipeleven]

it's so beautiful.... (snif) (teary eyed)

[treba]

Or just edit /etc/default/grub ...