On Sat, 2010-05-15 at 11:01 +0200, Richard Zidlicky wrote:
of course, and I do not think it is so hard to think of a sensible
behaviour.
After each (semi)automatic change to grub/kernel conf as well as for the very first
boot there should be a timeout as well as visible menu.
Once the kernel did boot with default command line etc it would be safe to set
the timeout to a small value - after asking the user.
More elaborate solution, there could be two config values - quicktimeout and
safetimout.
After kernel and config changes timeout would be changed to safetimout and once
the kernel booted safely it could be reset to quicktimeout automatically.
Neat idea. But if a breaking kernel change somehow occurs without
triggering the change to the safetimeout, we would not want the user to
be completely stuck. I see two ways to address that:
- Make quicktimeout nonzero enough that the user has time to react.
- When grub attempts booting with quicktimeout, have it change to
safetimeout. Then have an initscript that changes back to quicktimeout
once booting has succeeded. Grub already has a "default boot entry"
field in the stage2 image that can be written by boot commands for
exactly this purpose; see the info docs. The same could be done for the
timeout. (This would appear to be a common trick: my Dell Latitude
D620's BIOS does the same thing with the power-on self test.)
--
Matt