Usplash

[Nathaniel McCallum]

I'm sending this to the list so more people can contribute to
discussion.

On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 16:57 +0100, Paul Sladen wrote:
> Okay, is this only going to appear on ``Press F2'' or something?

If you are running ubuntu, it does this already (ESC though).  The whole
point of matching the kernel vesa mode to the grub vesa mode is to
decrease the number of mode switches.  The best way to do this is to
make grub not do a mode switch (it doesn't if the menu is disabled and
the grub-splash is disabled).  Then, we tell the kernel what mode switch
to perform.  From that point (if we use directfb [arch independent] or
kdrive in vesa mode [arch dependant]) the only mode switch that will
occur is X being loaded with non-vesa drivers.

So startup looks like this (* - represents mode switch):
bootloader -- bios text mode
*kernel -- mode selected on kernel command line
init -- in quiet/splash mode
usplash -- kdrive (vesa mode, only x86) or directfb (not Xdirectfb) uses
whatever mode fb is in (no mode switch)
*GDM -- mode selected by XFConfig

Ideally (perhaps in the future), we could integrate usplash with gdm.
So that we get status updates on what is happening during boot.  Then,
when the user is able to log in, we pop up the login widget.  That would
give us one mode switch and we would not need to worry about kernel
framebuffer.  

So it would look like this (* - is a mode switch):
bootloader -- bios text mode
kernel -- no framebuffer (but quiet output)
init -- in quiet/splash mode
*GDM -- showing status updates and allowing login when able

No text except possibly a "Starting Ubuntu..." would appear between
bootloader and gdm.

The issues I see with this now are mostly security.  ie. we can't write
the Xauth file when we have no writeable filesystems.  Daniel: Could we
write Xauth to tempfs then move it to the right place when we have
writeable filesystems?

Nathaniel