Improving the Fedora Boot Experience 109
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a recent post on Red Hat senior interaction designer Máirín Duffy's blog with an illuminating look at Red Hat's design process, and how things like graphic elements, widget behavior, and bootup time are taken into account. It starts: "So I have this thing on my desk at Red Hat that basically defines a simple design process. (Yes, it also uses the word 'ideate' and yes, it sounds funny but it is a real word apparently!) While the mailing list thread on the topic at this point is high-volume and a bit chaotic, there is a lot of useful information and suggestions in there that I think could be pulled into a design process and sorted out. So I took 3 hours (yes, 3 hours) this morning to wade through the thread and attempt to do this."
Why? (Score:1)
I boot my system maybe twice a year.
What annoys me is not the graphical appearance during the boot, but the lengthy checks of the filesystems on my 6 disks that are run sequentially instead of parallel.
That is a better thing to work on than nice pictures, IMHO.
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Sure buddy; sounds like you're running XP. Fedora has well documented average time between kernel panics of 3.4 days.
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app server: .... 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 7 21:02:57 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Linux
14:16:03 up 63 days, 21:19, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.10, 0.03
db server: .... 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 7 21:02:57 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Linux
14:16:37 up 63 days, 21:20, 1 user, load average: 1.86, 1.51, 1.65
forced a reboot a couple of months ago due to power outage, before that couple stayed up for 184 days.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw this argument in another thread. If you have a modern machine with long uptimes, it means your probably not up ot the latest patch.
I generally reboot my server only when systemd(init), or the kernel is upgraded
Thats about once every two weeks to a month TOPS. I wouldn't brag about having an unpatched machine.
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Yeah, those machines are not patched with 'latest patches', correct, so what is your point? I wouldn't want to upgrade kernel or anything on those machines at all.
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But *when* it needs a reboot, it takes 2 hours. That is a bit longish, you know.
Are you serious? Might be time to use one of those new-fangled drives that don't run on clockwork. If your drives are taking that long to fsck, I think you must have something wrong. And it also shouldn't need to be done every time you boot.
Or if you really are somehow flogging your filesystem that hard it might be worth considering a different one. Ext2 can take a long time to fsck, of course, but nowadays there's not much advantage to using a non-journaling filesystem except when mounted read-only (e.g
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can adjust that check frequency setting, 180 days is merely the default. But unless you can schedule to take the file-systems off-line, or put them in read-only mode and run an appropriate "fsck" on them before re-establishing write permission, this is actually a very good idea. There's nothing like the beginning of a disk problem being missed, or a file system corruption tied to a particular bad kernel, to leave a critical system in an unrecoverable state.
For whatever group I work with, whether my own colleages or a business partner, I do try to schedule a reboot of *everything*, and a reboot at least once a year, to make sure that backups are done and tested and all the hardware will reboot successfully when the experts are _not_ available. You might be _amazed_ at the numer of servers described as "it just works" which failed on reboot, and failover systems and redundant connections that were _not_ failing over properly and were _not_ redundant.
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Maybe my diskspace is a bit more than yours?
I've got a Fedora install with over 10TB of space in ext4 and I reboot about as often as you do.
Despite that, fsck adds only about 30 seconds to my boot.
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I'm at 5 nines on my home server (Score:4, Funny)
I don't get all the hype about uptime.
My multi-media server easily gets five nines of uptime.
In fact, over 2012 it was way better than 9.9999% !
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That's been taken care of by modern file systems.
Also, do you apply security patches to your kernel on-the-fly somehow, or how come you don't have to reboot?
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I don't need security patches, I have McAfee.
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That's been taken care of by modern file systems.
Also, do you apply security patches to your kernel on-the-fly somehow, or how come you don't have to reboot?
What is this bait? I mean, really? Every damn time someone mentions uptime?
Fine. I'll bite. [ksplice.com]
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Not everyone boots their systems "maybe twice a year." Hell, I leave my system running 24/7 and even I reboot a fair number of times more than that. Even if someone reboots for nothing more than kernel updates and otherwise never shuts down, they'll probably still reboot more than twice.
That said... while I see why they might want to "polish" the boot process and speed it up, I'm still not really sure it's worth it. Whenever I hear about "improving" the boot screen, I fear removing all the information di
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You remind me of the old adage about a PHB who discovers the *nix* priority command, and decides to make everything priority 1, so that "everything will run faster".
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It doesn't matter how pretty it looks (Score:1)
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It just needs to be fast IMHO.
Anyone else agree?
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
For instance, if you are on a system where kernel mode setting Isn't Quite There Yet, it is fairly likely that 'pretty' won't even be possible, just because of the amount of flailing between the BIOS and early boot mucking around in some legacy VGA mode, and then a bunch of flickering when things eventually get handed to X. It's not so much that anyt
Re: It doesn't matter how pretty it looks (Score:1)
'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
But 'pretty' is important when trying not to scare new users (aka 'non-professional' users) away.
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This
To bad it's AC or I would have spent a mod point on it. There is nothing more scary to a non techie than the boot/kernel puking garbage on the screen. And there is no end to the [what's-it-telling-me-now? | should-I-worry? | what-is-it-counting-up/down-for?] support [calls | yells | screams | cries | sobbing].
Pretty is step 2 of making it onto the everyday consumer's PC. Step 1 would be "just works".
Don't scare regular users of GNU/Linux. (Score:4, Insightful)
.
You are exactly right. The original Mac OSX boot-up experience is a nice clean boot up screen with a few simple small icons flying by. The original Mac OS7 OS8 and OS9 bootups have a happy mac icon centered on the screen and the small icons for the addons on the bottom of the screen.
.
Linux boot-ups should have a simple graphical or text based boot up that says just a very few simple things:
checking drives
starting network
starting graphics
tada!
and allow for the user to hit one of the function keys or a space bar or something to allow for viewing of the detailed boot-up log. Most people don't really need to see all of the details and would certainly be scared by all of the words and labels that they might not understand. This is one area where OSX actually does a better job.
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Why would they be scared?
Judged by my experience (somewhat limited, I admit) of other people they aren't even scared of error messages if they recur often enough to be considered standard behaviour.
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Why would they be scared?
Judged by my experience (somewhat limited, I admit) of other people they aren't even scared of error messages if they recur often enough to be considered standard behaviour.
And that's part of the problem. Better to display important information when it's needed - particularly when these are users who may not easily differentiate issues from normal behaviour. It's like having a warning light that flashes red every three seconds to indicate that everything is fine, but will flash red every second when there's an issue.* That's how this crap appears to users, and one reason why users so often click through important dialogue boxes.
* I absolutely fucking hate flashing LEDs on lapt
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Do you remember Red Hat Graphical Boot? That kinda did that.
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Apart from being useful for debugging when there is a problem (and you can tell somebody where it got to or google it), the scrolling text gives feedback that the hamsters are pedalling as fast as they can and there is some actual progress.
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it should do what Solaris 10 did years ago? Yes!! (Score:2)
.
Yes!!!
Sure, why not? That's the sad part with too much software. Sometimes, developers add change for the sake of change (or for power trips), rather than for expressly improving the software or its usability. If solaris did it back then that way, then it did it right. Someone else pointed out that for a while redhat bootup did that too. Too bad redhat went away from there. IMHO, a nice clean boot with the option to see details as
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Bullshit. Yoiu probably think owners want their cars to play chords, massage their shoulders and emit perfume when they are started. Newsflash: they DON'T CARE.
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I prefer my car to play music and a shoulder massage would be great. Not sure of the last one, but lots of people have air fresheners in their cars.
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'Pretty' itself is largely pointless(and tends to be used to obscure actually useful boot-spew); but the ability to achieve it can be a symptom of good things.
But 'pretty' is important when trying not to scare new users (aka 'non-professional' users) away.
Arguably, with contemporary hardware, every second between hitting the power button and seeing the login prompt is 'ugly' no matter how attractive the loading animation.
I certainly won't deny that throwing the results of a confused OpenBSD system, in some ghastly VGA legacy text mode, at the user on every boot is a good strategy; but if the hardware that a normal user is trying to boot(ie. no massive disk arrays or other things that Just Take Time to spin up and check) gives them long enough to start worryi
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I don't give a shit what it looks like, and short of extremes I don't care how long it takes, but I care how informative it is. I have the kernel options set to a text mode boot display anyway, which is actually (gasp) useful.
dump silly start up graphics (Score:5, Interesting)
The start up graphics is pointless, it is not interesting, nor does it tell you anything useful, and it just makes the boot process seem very slow.
One of the first things I do with a new fedora system is to disable the start up graphics, and display the boot up messages. So the boot process appears faster (may take exactly the same wall clock time, never measured it), and there is something at least vaguely interesting to look at. Plus, if it freezes for some reason, I've got some hint as to where the problem occurred.
Re: (Score:2)
Scrolling all that text without 2D accelerated hardware (not likely to be in place that early) likely adds more to the startup time than loading and displaying a graphical progress bar, especially considering how any drive will read far more than necessary for booting in one go, so the extra load time will be virtually zero.
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Scrolling all that text without 2D accelerated hardware (not likely to be in place that early) likely adds more to the startup time than loading and displaying a graphical progress bar.
If you disable graphical boot, the console doesn't switch to "graphic" mode until fairly late in the boot sequence. It's pretty easy to see this happen as the font visibly changes.
So, it's all text mode during the most critical time, and only slow on pretty ancient hardware. Any video card even halfway decent (like less than 10 years old) will do just fine in either mode.
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On any machine made this century the boot messages should fly past way, way faster than I can read them. If for some reason it hangs at some point during the boot process, then I guess there should be a button to hit or hold (or boot option if you're not doing this physically) to see it but otherwise its just nerd porn. The rest you can show me in a device manager or whatever after I've booted.
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Well I have commissioned at least 3 machines this century, where I had time to read the messages...
But even whizzing past at speed, like my latest machine with SSD, still beats looking at the fedora logo being filled in - IMHO! :-)
That used to be true with SysVinit. (Score:1)
But with systemd you STILL don't know why it hangs.
systemd throws everything not explicitly serialized into running at the same time.
Unfortunately, even the explicitly serialized modules don't necessarily start properly.
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Unfortunately, even the explicitly serialized modules don't necessarily start properly.
Systemd is one of the final reasons why I recently dumped Archlinux off my laptop and returned to Slackware after an interval of 3 years. (There are lots of other reasons, but suffice to say that the reason why I liked Arch in the first place was its similarities to Slackware. Those are now pretty much absent.)
The old BSD-style init scripts still rock after 20 years.
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Yup. I loved Arch for it's connection to the "Unix way" until they decided to force systemd on us and then basically silenced and/or censored all naysayers. Sure it's their distro, they can do what they like, however silencing dissenting opinions in that fashion just didn't sit right with me, even more so than the systemd decision imo. Rather than Slack, it's been FreeBSD for me, however. Always been a fan of it on servers, and these days it's been good enough for the desktop in my case. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but there's nothing that says a distro HAS to use systemd. Maybe GNOME is getting too intertwined with it to allow kicking systemd to the shitter, but there are far batter DEs than GNOME 3 which couldn't care less HOW the system gets booted. Init scripts work as well as ever. The same goes for pulseaudio.
If Poettering and his ilk turns linux into a piece of shit, the community at large has nobody to blame except their collective selves.
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Except nobody wants to listen to our complaints? I don't want systemd or wayland. But they're going to be forced on us. And I'll be expected to support them.
The last time I turned off my machine (Score:2)
was when I reinstalled windows after a hardware upgrade, 3 months ago
my work laptop gets suspended every night, its been over a year since its "booted"
and even if I boot a machine from the dead cold, screw it, I go get a cup of coffee and its done before I return
welcome to 2013, no one cares
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was when I reinstalled windows after a hardware upgrade, 3 months ago
Considering that any 'critical' Windows update requires a reboot, and every update cycle includes at least one critical update, you haven't been updating your system or you haven't rebooted after updating (which creates a rather unstable environment).
Re:More "designer" bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, that's why I ditched UEFI. Flashed my /boot/ right into the BIOS with Coreboot. Just as secure as UEFI if I want it to be, and the system literally boots instantly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What motherboard are you using ?
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Yep, that's why I ditched UEFI. Flashed my /boot/ right into the BIOS with Coreboot. Just as secure as UEFI if I want it to be, and the system literally boots instantly.
Coreboot! coreboot. Thanks! I've been looking for something like that.
I've got a print server .. (Score:2)
I'll accept 'ideate' (Score:2)
As long as 'performant' and 'documentate' are banished.
ideate ? ideation? suicidal? (Score:1)
-- Ideation (idea generation), the process of creating new ideas
-- Suicidal ideation, a common medical term for thoughts about suicide
Suicidal? So is fedora boot going to automatically "kill -9" itself everytime it boots? Has sentience arrived along with french existential angst for the OS? I would have expected french
They should go back to early Fedora/RedHat Linux 9 (Score:3, Funny)
Most of the boot improvements created since then have done nothing but irritate the experienced users. Honestly, I wish some of the "improvements" to GUIs were undone too.
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Nah, go back to v5 with text based boot ups. ;)
Experience? (Score:2)
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The whole boot experience sucks. (Score:1, Insightful)
If you want to see how a system should boot, go check out Haiku or OS X. Hell, even Windows does it fairly well.
I can't stand Linux boot processes. Typically there is some over complicated piece of shit bootloader that wants to kick my display into graphical mode so it can puke up distro-themed garbage all over my display for 5 seconds... Then things go black, the kernel starts to vomit verbose crap all over my screen in text mode, then the early graphical boot progress thing fires up X.org for a bit until
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Wow, it's almost like you didn't read TFA at all...
experience? (Score:5, Funny)
Booting Fedora is an "experience"? Who knew?
Naw, that's not an experience. An experience is being high on some sticky purple bud and driving a Lamborghini Gallardo on the Pacific Coast Highway with CHP on your tail and $7.5million in stolen money in a backpack on the seat next to you and busting through a guard rail, getting thrown 70 feet from the car and watching the Gallardo burst into a fireball while you realize you were only scratched and you somehow grabbed the backpack when you were thrown from the car. And now the police and the guys you stole the money from and your wife all think you're dead.
Now THAT'S an experience. Booting Fedora is not an experience.
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I take it you speak from experience?
Nicely assorted pile of "let's ignore the problems (Score:1)
I'm afraid I violated Slashdot rules. Mairin does a very nice job of showing that he's drunk the latest Fedora "electric kool-aid" and has entirely missed the most critical problems.
* Boot loaders *DO NOT NEED GRAPHICS*. Throwing out the graphics would get rid of most of the "oh, no, my screen resolution is changing and flashing, and I have to load half the graphics libraries to get the trademark image I want, I have the wrong icon, boo-hoo-hoo". Just don't use graphics. booting will be much faster and mor
Ubuntu (Score:2)
No research necessary here; just make it boot as quickly as Ubuntu. Not much need for fancy graphics when the boot is so fast.
And for the "I boot once a millenium" crowd: (a) kernel updates are considered a good thing, and (b) some people use laptops.
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When you can cold boot in less than 10 seconds, why use hibernation??
Re:Just show boot messages (Score:4, Informative)
Remove "rhgb" and "quiet" from the kernel boot line. Fixed.
Typical Slashdot (Score:1)
I boot my system maybe twice a year. What annoys me is not the graphical appearance during the boot, but the lengthy checks of the filesystems on my 6 disks that are run sequentially instead of parallel. That is a better thing to work on than nice pictures, IMHO.
The start up graphics is pointless, it is not interesting, nor does it tell you anything useful, and it just makes the boot process seem very slow. One of the first things I do with a new fedora system is to disable the start up graphics, and display the boot up messages. So the boot process appears faster (may take exactly the same wall clock time, never measured it), and there is something at least vaguely interesting to look at. Plus, if it freezes for some reason, I've got some hint as to where the problem occurred.
All of this is useful to the average user, how?
They already did this best thing they could (Score:3)
systemd. I know many people don't like it, but its awesome. It makes reboots on servers that much faster, cutting the boot time around half from sysvinit, and making the shut off time under 3 seconds.
in addition, it replaces polkit, and intergrates with acpid, and udev, making it very very solid in keeping track of programs and hardware. None of the glitchyness or sluggesness of initscripts. No more relying on bash scripts to keep track of things like PIDs.
very eligant modern solution for replacing init with a v
also replacing consolekit was probably the best thing to happen to linux since HAL was obsoleted by added udev funcitonaility.
Its very un-UNIX like, but it gives the boot proccess and daemon handling a very very professional unfied method, and speed/agility that linux needs to compete with windows and mac.
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"and making the shut off time in under 3 seconds"...
My server runs squid and transmission and by DEFAULT, both have
shutdown timeouts around 10-20 seconds which they usually try to take.
---
No more being able to boot single user from the root disk
No more being able to bring up the system 1 service at a time in
single-step mode to debug a problem.
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Yeah systemd was so fast when it tried to boot my system -- it mounted
the local file systems before running lvm.
For some reason that didn't work.
Can't seem to m
Beware of fstype and other processes. (Score:1)
Beware of issues with non-native filesystem types and processes other than fsck slowing your disks to a crawl.
I have one big ext4 boot partition with Ubuntu 12.04 and one external NTFS systen. Fsck hasn't given me much problem even if a shutdown left the boot partition dirty and it needs to run on the next boot.
Dealing with NTFS from linux can be dicey, especially if the hardware does not perform well. I have a slow disk that I have had to umount a couple of times to get through some problems.
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