On Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:52:24 -0400 Mike Pinkerton <pselists(a)mindspring.com> wrote:
+ If a user could hold the key down from before power on until the
boot options menu appeared, then Fedora could still do extremely fast
booting without presenting the user with a short time interval to
hit. If grub finds the keyboard, and detects no "F" key hold down,
it would continue to boot immediately with no further delay.
There are at least two problems with that:
* Holding key over remote VNC console can be problematic,
especially if the server POSTs slowly.
* Holding key on BIOS machines usually results in a long beep
sound and keyboard lockup. I never understood why.
And again, I would like to add that servers tend to change video
mode during POST, sometimes even several times. On some chassis
this results to losing video output for several (think 2) seconds.
That means that even showing a brief [press F for options] sucks.