There's A Discussion Again About Flipping On Intel "Fastboot" DRM Driver Support

For over six years now has been the Intel DRM driver's "Fastboot" support for eliminating unnecessary mode-set operations during the boot process, with an original focus on improving the laptop/ultrabook boot experience. While there have been attempts at getting Fastboot enabled by default, it hasn't happened to date but now a Red Hat developer is hoping to get it turned on for at least some generations of Intel hardware to benefit the work going into improving the Fedora boot experience.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede has inquired to the Intel Linux developers about enabling Fastboot by default. For the past number of years the support can be manually enabled via the i915.fastboot=1 boot parameter, but it hasn't wound up being the default due to bugs coming up, particularly on now older generations of Intel graphics hardware.

So there is a new discussion about enabling Intel fastboot driver support for delivering this cleaner boot experience. But it doesn't look like this default change will happen immediately as at least some on Intel's driver team would prefer fixing all of the associated bugs before flipping the switch.

What Hans de Goede has expressed his hope for is at least getting the support enabled by default for newer generations of Intel hardware where there appears to be better handling, with at least one Intel developer agreeing with this selective approach, but no firm decision to this latest discussion.

Hopefully something will come of this conversation with at least seeing Intel Fastboot enabled for newer hardware. Hans de Goede has been on the recent task at Red Hat on improving the Fedora boot process, including potentially hiding the GRUB boot menu by default, which has upset some in the Fedora community. The boot process changes are currently being worked on for Fedora 29.