Re: Parallel kernel loading and keystroke capture in GRUB2

[Felipe Sateler]

Kok, Auke wrote:

> Arthur Marsh wrote:
>> Arjan van de Ven wrote, on 2008-11-29 02:06:
>>> Vlad wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> In a recent demonstration of how to boot Linux in 5 seconds [1],
>>>> PowerTOP developers did not use GRUB2, even though GRUB2 is a
>>>> necessary component of any production and consumer Linux system or
>>>> multi-boot environment. As I see it, the greatest disadvantage of
>>>> GRUB2 is that it needlessly wastes the time in which it gives the
>>>> user the chance to stall the boot sequence in order to make changes
>>>> to the boot settings. Of course, having this option available is a
>>>> necesity in case the user's hardware requires tweaking the
>>>> parameters passed to the kernel. However, GRUB2 should be loading
>>>> the default kernel during this time, instead of deferring this
>>>> IO-bound task to after the timeout has elapsed.
>>> we used grub 1.
>>>> Since popular Linux distros typically display the GRUB2 intro
>>>> message for 30 seconds,
>>> I'm not aware of mainstream distributions using grub2 yet. Also, I'm
>>> not aware of any distro using 30 seconds as timeout, the longest I've
>>> seen is 5 seconds.
>> 
>> Debian GNU/Linux offers grub2 as an option on installation.
> 
> Debian also offers the kitchen sink, including anvil and builtin laser
> microscope.
> 
> It's fine that they do, but I doubt that debian or any of the other
> distributions will want to offer grub2 as DEFAULT bootloader at installation
> time.
> 
> Until that happens grub2 is an experiment and certainly not interesting for
> fast boot purposes. I would personally stay far away from grub2.

grub2 is enabled in the debian installer by default given some conditions are
met (if I understand correctly, only when installing on some EFI-based
systems). There was a proposal to make grub2 default for lenny, but apparently
it didn't make it.

-- 

  Felipe Sateler