Re: [PATCH 3/4] Optionally print less messages at boot

[Daniel Kiper]

On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 07:53:23PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 05-04-18 14:12, Daniel Kiper wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 04:50:27PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> >>The patch optionally makes grub not show any text (be fully quiet) when
> >>timeout_style=hidden is set and the user does not interrupt the boot.
> >>
> >>Combined with a later patch in this series which makes grub not touch
> >>the EFI console unless it actually has some text to print, this will keep
> >>the vendor logo which EFI put on the display in place until the kernel
> >>touches the display. Leading to a more smooth / seamless boot experience.
> >>
> >>At least Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu have been carrying patches for this
> >>for a long time now (since 2013). There have been several attempts to
> >>upstream these patches in the past already, which have been rejected
> >>because not everyone likes the quiet behavior.
> >
> >May I ask you to provide links to the relevant conversations?
>
> Sure you may ask, but I cannot really help with that because I was not
> involved in grub development back then.
>
> I've done a quick search of the mailinglist archives, but
> I'm afraid I could not find anything that way.

OK, let's leave it.

> >>This patch makes the quiet behavior optional and defaults to off, so
> >>unless grub is compiled with the new --enable-quiet-boot configure option
> >>this patch changes nothing.
> >
> >I am not sure why this should be build time option. I would see this as
> >a runtime option, e.g. boot_quiet shell variable or even timeout_style=quiet.
> >Hmmm... Latter is probably preferred.
>
> The problem is that grub already prints various things before reading
> its environment or config file.
>
> What I've understood from the history of this patches, removing those
> earlier prints (see e.g. the grub-core/boot/i386/pc/boot.S change in
> this patch) was objected against because that provides info that at
> least the first stage (for a classic PC BIOS boot setup) has successfully
> loaded.
>
> The menu code itself is already quiet when using timeout_style=hidden,
> the problem is the messages printed before (and after) the menu code.
>
> If you're happy with killing the messages shown before the config file
> is loaded (as most distros already do), then the rest could be made runtime
> configurable.

If they are printed deliberately I am not happy with killing them blindly.
However, I think that it can be done in other way. Could we add an option
to grub-mkimage (and other tools if it is needed) which disables printing
of these messages?

Daniel