event based initramfs

[Paul Sladen]

On Fri, 11 May 2012, Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 5/11/2012 2:52 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> > …
> …

There is no reason why it should be mutually exclusive:

  1. Gimme a terminal straight away.
  2. Get on with booting in the background as, and when disks show up.

The common-case is that the user just *wants the system to boot;*

And the even more common-case is that the user wouldn't know what to
type even if given a terminal too soon.

That can be avoided by having an infinite non-blocking timeout for
disk fail, and a zero non-blocking timeout for magic shell popup.

Then the onerous would be on a l33t power-user to willfully pause the
existing boot sequence from the terminal (if they need to do something
*really special*) and for every other case it would recover gracefully.

	-Paul


(It might need some design input for how to present this in practice).