UsplashInitramfs

Revision 2 as of 2005-11-04 20:50:18

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Summary

initramfs currently doesn't output to the progress bar in usplash, only to the text output area. We would prefer it if it would do both.

Rationale

This will become more important if usplash grows a quiet/notext option, and you lose all text feedback. It's also just prettier and shinier to do this "right".

Use cases

Bob boots his computer and sees feedback, and this makes him happy. Go Bob. Jane boots a LiveCD and is THRILLED about all the wonderful progress bar bling.

Implementation

We will dedicate an arbitrary ganularity of percentage ticks to each output (both quiet and not) in initramfs, incrementing a tick counter each time, then pass that count to init/rc when we hand off control, so it knows where to begin from (so the bar doesn't jump)

  • This doesn't sound like a very elegant solution IMHO, although I suppose it's the only one that would work with the current USplash. Let me suggest something: instead of explicitly telling USpash that it should "PROGRESS x", USplash should only be told to "PROGRESS", and magically know how much to move its progress bar. How? Well, at every boot, have USpash measure how long it passes between a "PROGRESS" and the next one, and have it save this information "somewhere" (the "somewhere" might be a problem, if there's no root filesystem mounted yet!).

    At the next boot, USplash will know quite precisely how to update the progress bar to make it <b>really</b> reflect the time that's left. This would mean no weird "jumps" in the progress bar, and accurate progress bar, and no need for less-than-beautiful solutions like passing the tick counter to init/rc.

    • LjL

Outstanding issues

None