Re: Adjustments to userland for a quieter startup (RC system)

As far as I can tell, this is coming down to a question of aesthetics or work preference. Inventing new output tiers is likely to be slow and controversial.

I think boot_mute cuts a nice middle path that can please most everyone….provided that it can extend the overlay to login prompt (thus covering up kernel init as well as RC init).

The source suggests to me that once the vt subsystem is up and the console connected, the overlay is expelled. I don’t have a background in this, but what’s the difficulty of making that overlay persist?

Steven

On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 14:22, Maku Bex <[zagazaw2004@gmail.com](mailto:On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 14:22, Maku Bex <<a href=)> wrote:

> Because they all follow the same concept. The startup text is useless in that stage of the OS. If i need it for troubleshooting, dmesg can provide it. IMHO, no text or no splash are irrelevant if they don't speed up the boot process. Until we find a way to deal with this, it all boils down to how the end users like to see when their FreeBSD machine boots up.
>
> On Mon, Feb 3, 2025, 12:58 Warner Losh < imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>> Most systems have a pretty splash screen, but a very noisy actual text screen if you get to it :) I'd be inclined to make that work if it has broken (it used to work great).
>>
>> Warner
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2025 at 11:10 AM Maku Bex < zagazaw2004@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Remember that quiet/silent != fast. You might as well ask for a "pretty" splash screen instead of the dizzying text scroll.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Feb 3, 2025, 12:05 Gleb Smirnoff < glebius@freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, Feb 02, 2025 at 10:19:11AM +0000, Steven Harms (High-Security Mail) wrote:
>>>> S> I also realize that this is a probably a controversial perspective. My motivation here is ultimately service to the FreeBSD Laptop project. Windows and OSX have conditioned many in the population of the FreeBSD-curious to expect a lot less text on startup if things are going well.
>>>>
>>>> This is how I call this strategy: "trying to win by mimicing current winner".
>>>> This ain't going to work in general, even if you are mimicing good features.
>>>>
>>>> But this particular thing is a misfeature. I find it a big problem that
>>>> computer is absolutely silent and unresponsive when it is doing something.
>>>> This has been a problem in the Windows world since Windows 95. This is not a
>>>> feature that gave Windows and OSX their current popularity. It is a problem
>>>> and was it fixed they may have eaten even a bigger piece of the desktop market.
>>>> As you see many people responded with disagreement to your suggestion. Was OSX
>>>> more reporting to its users, maybe those people would be already on OSX instead
>>>> of FreeBSD?
>>>>
>>>> Of course, FreeBSD policy is - TOOLS NOT POLICY :) So patches to optionally
>>>> enable silent boot are welcome.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Gleb Smirnoff