If something goes wrong and the system needs to inform the user about it, there's no real reason to keep the splashscreen showing, anyway. I think the most sensible way to implement this is to show the splashscreen and let the system continue to write data into the text buffer (0x000B8000 or wherever it is located). If something happens, the splashscreen could be deactivated, the system switches to the text mode and you'll get the traditional console with all that has been outputted during boot (since the buffers are preserved on mode switches).
That would include the X11 server failing to start, which would put make the system go into text mode, if the splashscreen was being shown. I guess that could be helped by a daemon monitoring the signals applications emit, among other things, and deactivate the splashscreen. Once it's off, the daemon can kill itself, since it's not needed anymore, thus not eating resources for nothing. I guess the difference here is that CoolStart is something that seems to be located mostly in GRUB (I've ran into his blog earlier while trying to find out about splashscreens), while what I've in mind would be completely kernel based. I suppose the GRUB code, including the splashscreen stuff, is available in the ON source code? I've always wanted to relearn C again, I guess this would be a nice idea to toy around with (in QEMU for now), to get high color support. -mg > This was prototyped a while ago as part of a > Sun-internal project named > "CoolStart", and you can see some of it by following > the instructions in > Jan's blog at <http://blogs.sun.com/setje/> - but as > noted, the big > blocker there (which I don't think has yet been > solved) is the lack of a > good way to deal with things going wrong that need > console interaction - > errors reported from services or filesystems needing > to fsck, etc. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
