Re: Open a discussion about bug 253324
On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 09:54:48AM +0200, Jens Schmalzing wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Bluefuture writes:
>
> > > The low techie people I came across think that anything beside
> > > graphics are "old computing" or recovery broken things... so a
> > > bootsplash help they to trust the operating system (the computer
> > > as whole object from their point of view).
> >
> > I'm totally agree on this point. In my experience of installing
> > debian to many different kind of people this is a very diffuse user
> > cases and not only for low tech people also for avg tech people.
> > It's a little psicological problem against debian that a small and
> > tested kernel patch could solve.
>
> Psychology aside, there are two technical reasons for not integrating
> this kernel patch.
>
> One: It works exclusively with vesafb and this sucks. But let's
> assume for the moment that we all have nothing but i386 hardware and
> continue to
Ah, that's a good reason, unless you add a x86 emulator to
> Two: The official Debian kernel is modularized to a great extent. On
> i386, all framebuffer drivers and framebuffer console support itself
This is bullshit. I don't think it is a great idea to modularize the
kernel, and thus lose all the early debugging. We are going to hurt us
if we go that way, especially as the boot process is now more fragile as
it used to be, thanks to the initrd thingy, and thus we are going to get
lot of bug reports of the kind : the kernel don't work, the screen is
pitch black and nothing happens. It is ok on x86 where they have the
vgaconsole, but on powerpc this is most definitively not the way to go.
Jens, this is another of your let's take this decision all alone and
don't bother about the other members of the team. Please don't do that,
and start discussing a bit these things before you launch dead ahead and
go implement some stuff which will probably hurt more than help.
If you are that wild about modularizing stuff, please go ahead and
modularize the rest of the monolitic macintosh stuff, like the ADB stuff
and macintosh floppy drivers.
> are built as modules. Therefore, the console stays pitch black until
> those drivers are loaded, which happens exactly here:
>
> # head -2 /initrd/loadmodules
> modprobe -k vesafb > /dev/null 2>&1
> modprobe -k fbcon 2> /dev/null
>
> Nothing stops you from loading pretty pictures at this point (or not
> load the drivers at all, then XFree86 will be the first thing you
> see), but as Herbert rightly said, this can be done from userspace.
So, how then, please propose a solution, and please don't let your close
mindness take over here again.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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