Re: Boot messages (Was: Re: Ideas for v2.1)

Shinanyaku (shin@binary9.net)
Wed, 19 Jun 1996 10:38:28 -0400 (EDT)


Jamey Graham was heard saying ....
>
> > Why add it to lilo? Why not have a graphics viewer throw up the
> > screen while your init scripts run? Just put it first in your rc
> > scripts. Certainly not as nice as the lilo hack, but a lot easier to
> > implement quickly. You'd still see the kernel messages, but the init
> > messages would be hidden from the end user.
> >
>
> Explain to me exactly how one would go about doing it without completly
> freezing their system once the graphics viewer starts. It's not as
> simple as adding a line to an rc file. For your rc scripts to continue,
> the graphics viewer has to either exit (that's no good), or run in the
> background (unless there's a SVGA graphics viewer that will run like a
> daemon without a controlling tty). But SVGAlib (I think) needs the
> process running in the fg before it attempts any screen output. Then,
> if you do get the image to display, you have to be able to kill it in
> the end so you can get a login prompt.

Easy. Have the kernel place the VGA board (and only when it detects a
VGA) into 320x200x256, set the palette, dump a bitmap to video ram and
then continue.

The rest of the system will initiate and as long as nothing mucks with
the video registers, the image will stay on screen until <something>
places the board back into text mode.

>
> I'll stop here because this has nothing to do with the Linux kernel.

We can continue this on "linux-offtopic@binary9.net".

>
> Jamey
>
>

Shin!
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