The 9.10 boot loader progress bar

[John Dong]

On Jan 25, 2010, at 11:19 AM, John Moser wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 10:57 AM, John Dong <jdong at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> The Upstart event-driven bootup doesn't really have the notion of progress,
>> unlike the old SysV Init script bootup. It's hard to provide a linear
>> measure of progress...
> 
> This is why I disable 'quiet' ... my boot screen is like
> 
> 
> Loading kernel modules.... OK
> Mounting drives... OK
> Starting networking... OK
> 
> 
> It's familiar, and when something stalls it's suddenly not familiar.
> I don't have to care WHAT it's doing, just as long as it's doing
> something, and telling me what it's doing.  Apple used to do this in
> System 7 and System 8 at least by showing icons during boot,
> signifying what part of the boot process it was currently in.
There is no "part" of bootup progress anymore. Everything happens together in parallel as long as its dependencies are met, and can be arbitrary order during bootup. IO traffic in an unrelated bootup job can cause a seemingly small other job to "stall".

It's not at all surprising that non-linear booted OS'es like OS X 10.4+, Ubuntu with Upstart, Windows 2000+, etc do not attempt to show a linear progress bar.