Ubuntu Is Finally Fixing Its Annoying GRUB Setting
Back in March I wrote about The Most Common, Annoying Issue When Benchmarking Ubuntu On Many Systems -- when the kernel panics, when there's a power failure, or other system problem, the GRUB boot-loader screen will hang indefinitely until the user interacts with it. With running 50+ systems daily in a fully-automated environment for LinuxBenchmarking.com, this was the most annoying issue I've run into since it means manually hooking up a keyboard and monitor just to hit enter so it can boot into the system -- albeit the GRUB settings can be altered to avoid this happening. Most other Linux distributions don't use this GRUB record time fail to hang indefinitely.
After that article, someone opened this Launchpad bug report that was closed over "a deliberate design decision, not a bug...We are not going to degrade the experience for users who need to debug/recover from a failed boot in exchange for optimizing for the unusual case of someone cutting the power in the middle of the boot and expecting a non-interactive subsequent boot."
However, it seems others are starting to see this behavior as odd as the GRUB packaging was changed last month. With this Ubuntu Wily GRUB2 update, the behavior has changed. Rather than hanging indefinitely, GRUB will now just wait 30 seconds for user interaction. Someone else raised the same complaint about Ubuntu's GRUB configuration and this time the behavior was modified now to just wait 30 seconds and not indefinitely.
The GRUB2 package is in the Ubuntu 15.10 repository and is currently in the *-proposed repositories for testing on current releases of Ubuntu Linux.
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