brainstorming for the UDS-N session list

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 07:55:35AM +0200, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 09:21:59PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > I would like to see some work on the traditional server boot experience.  It 
> > regressed significantly in Lucid and has gotten some improvement in Maverick, 
> > but I don't think it's had a good looking over by server admins.  For server 
> > admins a logo is not what it beautiful.  Information about what's going on 
> > with their system is what tends to delight them.  Myself, if I'm booting a 
> > server where I can see the boot it's for trouble shooting and so I like it to 
> > be a bit chatty.  What is "good" is in many respects the opposite of what 
> > makes a good desktop boot.
> 
> Oh yes...We really don't need a pretty splashy bootup screen which hides all needed
> important informations, and I don't even care if the server is coming up 5 or 15 seconds,
> while the hardware init of the server itself takes 3 mins or more (depending on what hardware).

We use Plymouth's details plugin on servers, which is not a "pretty
splashy bootup screen", and does not include a logo.  At the risk of
being repetitive, the purpose of Plymouth in this context is to be a
reliable gateway for user interaction in the places where it's required
(including boot logging, which used to be a frequent server wishlist
item); and the reason it's currently required rather than optional is
that a good deal of critical boot code becomes much simpler (and thus
less likely to contain bugs) if it only needs to deal with one user
interaction pathway.

Upstart is intentionally quiet about job startup right now - or rather,
it encourages jobs not to write to the console when starting.  One thing
that would be useful would be to support a mode in which job startup is
logged to Plymouth by Upstart itself, which would mean that it would go
(a) to the screen during server boot and (b) to /var/log/boot.log.
Doing that would make it clearer which jobs have started and, more
importantly, which ones seem to be stuck if the system won't boot for
some reason.  This appears to be:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/565890

> > I'm not sure what track this goes in.
> 
> Private Plumbers Track: "How to get rid of Plymouth on Servers and make Upstart
> usable with unbelievable network interface setups?" (Attendees required: S.J.R.)

What I think would help here is if we stopped fighting about Plymouth
(usually with the misconception attached that Plymouth == splash screen)
and had a server-focused developer or two jump in and help out to make
Plymouth work smoothly in server contexts.  I don't think there's
actually that much to do there, just the odd focused bug-fix, and it
would greatly aid understanding.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]