Re: Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader?

[open...@hushmail.com]

Hi,

On 22. februar 2015 at 4:43 PM, "Polytropon" <fre...@edvax.de> wrote:
>
>On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 16:44:22 +0000, open...@hushmail.com wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader? Every time I boot
>> I'm distracted by it. Feels like I'm reading an 80s e-zine.
>
>It's easy to switch those off, and even the delay (mostly
>unneccessary). Add those to /boot/loader.conf:
>
> autoboot_delay="1"
> beastie_disable="YES"
>
>You still have the option to interrupt booting at this
>early stage.
>
>
>
>> Can't we be more like OpenBSD and keep things simple?
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
>
>FreeBSD's configuration mechanism for the boot loader
>easily allows that. :-)
>

That is all good, however, why does this stuff have to be there in the first place? Just seems a bit unprofessional that's all.

Thanks!

--

P.S. My mailbox has been full until today so if there were any additional replies I did not receive them.


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[Stephen R Guglielmo]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:50:57 +0000
open...@hushmail.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 22. februar 2015 at 4:43 PM, "Polytropon" <fre...@edvax.de> wrote:
> >
> >On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 16:44:22 +0000, open...@hushmail.com wrote:
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader? Every time I boot
> >> I'm distracted by it. Feels like I'm reading an 80s e-zine.
> >>

> >> Can't we be more like OpenBSD and keep things simple?
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
> >
> >FreeBSD's configuration mechanism for the boot loader
> >easily allows that. :-)
> >
>
> That is all good, however, why does this stuff have to be there in
> the first place? Just seems a bit unprofessional that's all.
>

I rather enjoy the ASCII art. Look at the grub bootloader on linux. I
think the FreeBSD bootloader is exactly as simple as it needs to be.
Obviously you need to provide for options such as custom booting,
alternate kernels, ACPI, and whatnot.

I would say more about this topic, but it doesn't matter what color the
bikeshed is.

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:50:57 +0000, open...@hushmail.com wrote:
> That is all good, however, why does this stuff have to be there
> in the first place?

FreeBSD has some tradition in combining a dialog-based boot
selection (with or without ACPI, into single-user mode, and
so on) with ASCII art. The advantage is that it will show on
serial lines or servers fine - most of them don't even have
a graphics card or a monitor attached so fancy 3D graphics
with HD sound effects would be useless.

After all, it depends a lot on individual preference if this
ASCII art makes the system more or less appealing to you, or
if you're able to ignore it altogether. Many people believe
in judging an operating system's quality from the colorfulness
of the splash screen, the boot loader, or the installer; in
their opinion, FreeBSD must be total crap. ;-)

> Just seems a bit unprofessional that's all.

As I said, it's easy to disable it if you don't like it. I
would not say it's unprofessional, but it might be a valid
opinion to say it's a bad default choice.

However, FreeBSD _gives_ you the ability to make a choice
how you want your boot prompt, splash screen, X login,
desktop environment and applications. This, in my opinion,
makes it _very_ professional compared to systems that force
a given set of settings upon the user, and there is no way
to make a different choice.


--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...

[Ralf Mardorf]

How many times a day do we see boot loader menus and startup messages?

Many machines most likely are up for much longer than just 24 hours.
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uptime

Regarding to ASCII art or no ASCII art, does it matter what a boot
loader menu and startup messages look like?

2 Cents,
Ralf

[Adrian Chadd]

On 27 February 2015 at 02:15, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.m...@rocketmail.com> wrote:
> How many times a day do we see boot loader menus and startup messages?
>
> Many machines most likely are up for much longer than just 24 hours.
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=uptime
>
> Regarding to ASCII art or no ASCII art, does it matter what a boot
> loader menu and startup messages look like?

The company that I work for ships appliances and VM images for said
appliance; having a VGA splash screen would be great.

I'm working on VESA support for the loader (and general graphics
framebuffer support for all platforms, since not all the world is
x86.) If nothing else, being able to have loader and kernel boot into
a high res text mode would be really helpful for debugging.



-a

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:05:53 -0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> The company that I work for ships appliances and VM images for said
> appliance; having a VGA splash screen would be great.
>
> I'm working on VESA support for the loader (and general graphics
> framebuffer support for all platforms, since not all the world is
> x86.)

Do you know about this project?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader

Maybe it could be put into active development and finally
become a (selectable) part of the default OS installation?

> If nothing else, being able to have loader and kernel boot into
> a high res text mode would be really helpful for debugging.

Until the letters become unreadable. ;-)

No, seriously: Tiny letters in text mode, usually a "feature"
of today's Linux, can be annoying when you don't sit infront
of a 35" 16:9 flat panel (and instead _have to use_ a 11" or
14" 4:3 screen). Trying to solve problems under such circumstances
is harder than in the common 80x25 environment due to readablilty.
But of course, YMMV applies.

--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...

[Adrian Chadd]

On 27 February 2015 at 10:21, Polytropon <fre...@edvax.de> wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 10:05:53 -0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> The company that I work for ships appliances and VM images for said
>> appliance; having a VGA splash screen would be great.
>>
>> I'm working on VESA support for the loader (and general graphics
>> framebuffer support for all platforms, since not all the world is
>> x86.)
>
> Do you know about this project?
>
> https://wiki.freebsd.org/OliverFromme/BootLoader
>
> Maybe it could be put into active development and finally
> become a (selectable) part of the default OS installation?

Yup. I started by getting that to work on -HEAD. Problem is, it's
limited to 640x480 and it's only useful for x86.
So I started down the rabbit hole of making it aware of VESA and
making it more flexible.

>
>> If nothing else, being able to have loader and kernel boot into
>> a high res text mode would be really helpful for debugging.
>
> Until the letters become unreadable. ;-)

So you load an 8x16 or a 16x32 font, and everything's fine. :)

> No, seriously: Tiny letters in text mode, usually a "feature"
> of today's Linux, can be annoying when you don't sit infront
> of a 35" 16:9 flat panel (and instead _have to use_ a 11" or
> 14" 4:3 screen). Trying to solve problems under such circumstances
> is harder than in the common 80x25 environment due to readablilty.
> But of course, YMMV applies.

The trick isn't to not do it at all. The trick is to give people the
option of whether to use it or not.

After going through the motions of bringing this up, I think the first
thing i'm going to do is teach the existing boot loader code about
VESA text modes and the initialisation path about things that aren't
just whatever-the-bios-initialised-it-as. There's a few things that
need adding - mostly exporting some variables about the screen
geometry so the forth code doesn't just assume everything is 80x25 -
but it should be straightforward.

I'll then work on the framebuffer support itself and making things
more generic so we can use the same framebuffer support for other
platforms (notably EFI booting, all the ARM stuff that's out there
with a framebuffer, etc.)




-adrian




-adrian

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:50:57 +0000
open...@hushmail.com wrote:

> On 22. februar 2015 at 4:43 PM, "Polytropon" <fre...@edvax.de> wrote:
> >
> >On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 16:44:22 +0000, open...@hushmail.com wrote:
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader? Every time I boot
> >> I'm distracted by it. Feels like I'm reading an 80s e-zine.
> >

> >It's easy to switch those off, and even the delay (mostly
> >unneccessary). Add those to /boot/loader.conf:
> >
> > autoboot_delay="1"
> > beastie_disable="YES"
> >
> >You still have the option to interrupt booting at this
> >early stage.
> >
> >
> >

> >> Can't we be more like OpenBSD and keep things simple?
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
> >
> >FreeBSD's configuration mechanism for the boot loader
> >easily allows that. :-)
> >
>

> That is all good, however, why does this stuff have to be there in

> the first place? Just seems a bit unprofessional that's all.
>
yeah, the killer argument ...

Erich