On patching usplash, boot times and Live CD

[Frank Schoep]

On Sunday 14 May 2006 13:13, Adam Conrad wrote:
> > VMware, normal boot: 38.7 seconds
> > VMware, textless boot: 21.7 seconds
> > Savings: 17 seconds, 44% of boottime
>
> Either VMware has a really, really poor VGA implementation (which I
> don't recall from past experience with it, though it's been a while
> since I used it) or, more likely, you're using a file-based disk image,
> and on the second boot, your disk image was mostly cached to RAM in the
> host system, reducing disk seeks.

Well, no. I've made sure disk cache wasn't an issue while testing this. I'm 
well aware of how my operating system works so I made sure the testing 
conditions are the same for each test run by booting clean first and then 
following the exact same step, making sure no background processes were doing 
I/O.

Slow VGA is actually the problem in VMware and not drawing the text does speed 
up things a lot. Slow, which is relative, VGA is also a bottleneck on real 
life systems.

> I've pleaded before, and I will one last time.  Can you let this rest
> until after dapper is out the door?  I appreciate your enthusiasm, but
> you need to appreciate that the timing of your enthusiasm is such that
> we can't reach consensus (no, your opinion isn't the only one that
> counts here), test changes, and get it into the distribution, with all
> the actual, non-aesthetic bugs we have to fix before release.

I would love to give you the reason I am doing this, but I'm not sure if I can 
openly talk about it so I took the liberty of leaving the reason out of this. 
To save some guesswork, I'm not a foreign secret agent or paid SuSE or Redhat 
developer trying to undermine the Dapper release :-)

> Had you approached us near the beginning of the cycle with these ideas,
> you would have found us (and me) far more receptive, but right now, all
> you're doing is creating noise for people who are trying desperately to
> get a non-buggy release out the door.  Bikeshedding about the look and
> feel of a splash screen is not helpful to this process.

I understand your line of thought and point of view. Unfortunately I can't go 
back in time and decide to contribute to Ubuntu earlier in the current 
universe's timeline.

If I look at Dapper now as an end user, the house is finished and the color of 
the bikeshed is ugly, leaving a bad initial impression. I really appreciate 
the hard work already done and being done on the house, but for "end user me" 
the color of the bikeshed is an important aspect.

I've tried to keep arty stuff on the art list while discussion technical 
problems here. I apologize if this distinction has not been clear enough. I 
promise to leave it at this for now. Major thanks to all of you for having to 
put up with me.

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep