On Monday 08 October 2007 00:10:10 Rene Herman wrote: > On 10/08/2007 12:40 AM, Alistair John Strachan wrote: > > Splash screens are clearly cosmetic, and it's kind of shameful (imo) that > > important messages explaining real problems are obscured from view by > > functionless splash screens. > > They're not functionless. You (and I) might not care for the function, but > their function is providing a "slick" bootup. That's why so many if not > basically all distributions of recent origin use them. Go ask Ubuntu for > example. > > > Personally, I think muddying the vga colour argument with splash screen > > stuff is bogus, they're very functionally separable ideas. A coloured > > oops seems to be a good way of telling novice users what information is > > relevant to their bug report. > > But when they're hidden by a splash screen, you don't see them any better > when they're red than when they're white. Splash screens were not mentioned > as any sort of alternative, their prevalence was mentioned as indication > that VGA console is only ever getting less important.
Obviously true, but that's not a reason to bar enhancements to the VGA console. Right now, there's no sane way to have a splash screen in userspace handle an oops, so people looking to reproduce and detect the root of a problem will inevitably fall back to VGA (or vesa, presumably), where colour might be useful. I recall seeing a distro kernel oops early in boot, where the palette had been corrupted by the splash so the oops wasn't readable. That's bad, right? Don't get me wrong, I don't care for the feature much, I just don't think "splash screens are defacto" is a reason to shy away from a feature that could be useful for novices reporting kernel bugs. These people are probably inbetween those that must have a shiny splash and those that fix the kernel bugs. Of course, what Alan said elsewhere about breaking things that work is a good reason to not add the feature, or at least make it only happen on a real display. -- Cheers, Alistair. 137/1 Warrender Park Road, Edinburgh, UK. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
