Re: making grub completely silent

[Jeroen Dekkers]

At Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:10:56 +0000,
Mario Emmenlauer wrote:
> 
> Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
> > At Tue, 06 Jun 2006 22:41:17 +0000,
> > Mario Emmenlauer wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I want grub to become completely silent. Namely I want the
> >> message 'Press <ESC> to show menu' and the message stating
> >> the loaded kernel and initrd to disappear.
> >>
> >> I need that for hundreds of distributed systems where users
> >> shouldn't be able to gather information about running services
> >> (including kernel version and bootloader) for security reasons.
> >> However, showing a boot-splash without any text would be fine.
> > 
> > Security through obscurity doesn't work.
> 
> 
> Surprise surprise, I knew that ;-)
> However I doubt that has anything to do with this case.
> 
> But back to topic, there are several cases where you don't
> want any output on the console, be it simply if there is
> no graphics card. AFAIK thats the intent of the silent-
> function in the first place.(?)

If you don't have a graphics cards, the BIOS will just ignore commands
to display stuff on the screen. I still fail to see any case how this
is useful.
 
> If I'd provide a patch that would make all *_printf()'s
> and *_putchar()'s bind to a numeric verbosity-level, would
> you be willing to include it in grub?

For GRUB Legacy (i.e. 0.9x), no. Only bugfixes will go there.

For GRUB 2 (where all development happens, as is described on the
homepage), I'm still not sure whether it's useful for anything. I
don't know what the other developers think however. Discussion about
the development of GRUB 2 takes place on another list (grub-devel), so
I suggest that you subscribe there and ask your question, because not
all GRUB 2 developers are subscribed to bug-grub.

Jeroen Dekkers