Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757940AbXJGXVR (ORCPT ); Sun, 7 Oct 2007 19:21:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755819AbXJGXVF (ORCPT ); Sun, 7 Oct 2007 19:21:05 -0400 Received: from smtp1.betherenow.co.uk ([87.194.0.68]:57265 "EHLO smtp1.bethere.co.uk" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755973AbXJGXVE (ORCPT ); Sun, 7 Oct 2007 19:21:04 -0400 From: Alistair John Strachan To: Rene Herman Subject: Re: "Re: [PATCH 0/2] Colored kernel output (run2)" + "`Subject:' usage" Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:20:59 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.7 Cc: Willy Tarreau , Ingo Molnar , Oleg Verych , Jan Engelhardt , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Dave Jones , Krzysztof Halasa , Medve Emilian-EMMEDVE1 , Helge Deller References: <200710072340.40828.alistair@devzero.co.uk> <47096752.2070107@keyaccess.nl> In-Reply-To: <47096752.2070107@keyaccess.nl> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200710080020.59742.alistair@devzero.co.uk> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2339 Lines: 50 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 majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/