Hello, Gentoo,
This isn't a critical problem, but it's a little irritating.
When my machine boots, it first displays the BIOS invitation to type F2,
then starts grub. Grub spends about 5 seconds with a blank screen, and
an underline cursor dotting about randomly in the top left hand area of
the screen, possibly some 25 x 80 area (whatever that might mean). Only
then does it display its boot menu.
My machine is a standard up to date (18 months old) AMD-64 Ryzen machine
booting from EFI.
Looking into my /boot/grub/grub.conf, I've got:
# Menu timeout
timeout=10
: the irritating delay is ~5 seconds, so this can't be due to anything
dependant on that timeout setting; and
# If we have a font available, start graphical output.
if loadfont unifont; then
echo "Loading unifont"
# Output resolution for GRUB (eg. 1024x768 or 'auto').
gfxmode=auto
# Output resolution for Linux (VESAFB only).
# 'keep' means use the same resolution as GRUB.
# For other framebuffer drivers, pass a resolution using the
# video= kernel param.
gfxpayload=keep
# Load all video drivers.
insmod all_video
# Switch to graphical output.
terminal_output gfxterm
fi
. I'm wondering if my problem has something to do with the 'insmod
all_video', and then the system is trying out lots of different video
modes, each with a long timeout, before finally finding the correct one.
Would, perhaps, a more specific value of gfxmode help?
Also, as an aside, grub has 878 .c files and a user's info guide
weighing in at 300 kbytes. It's great that the documentation exists,
but 300k? This is all just for a boot system. There are 255 loadable
modules. (For comparison, the Emacs core has just 132 .c files.) I
can't help feeling that this has got horribly out of hand.
I just need a program to boot the machine, that's all - I don't really
care what colours it uses, what fonts it uses, it only needs to read a
GPT partition table, and boot on utterly standard hardware. I
appreciate having a menu of different boot options (in my case, this
just means different kernel versions), but everything else is just
aesthetic sugar. Too much sugar isn't good for one.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
