Feature changed by: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) Feature #305317, revision 24 Title: Default to hidden bootloader menu openSUSE-11.2: Rejected by Christoph Thiel (cthiel1) reject date: 2009-08-05 12:17:52 reject reason: out of resources for 11.2. Priority Requester: Desirable Projectmanager: Desirable openSUSE-11.3: New Priority Requester: Desirable Info Provider: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) Requested by: Jiri Srain (jsrain) Description: As long as there is no other operating system present (SUSE is the only system), it makes sense to default to hidden bootloader menu (and booting directly). References: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Hidden-menu-interface https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425717 Discussion: #1: Stephan Kulow (coolo) (2009-04-16 10:34:48) I like that idea. I guess it's a tiny change for bootloader, but has possibly some docu impact. #2: Stanislav Visnovsky (visnov) (2009-05-28 16:45:13) How should it behave with option to keep kernels from updates (libzypp option)? What about failsafe? #3: Jiri Srain (jsrain) (2009-06-01 11:21:11) From the GRUB documentation: When your terminal is dumb or you request GRUB to hide the menu interface explicitly with the command `hiddenmenu' (*note hiddenmenu::), GRUB doesn't show the menu interface (*note Menu interface::) and automatically boots the default entry, unless interrupted by pressing ESC. When you interrupt the timeout and your terminal is dumb, GRUB falls back to the command-line interface (*note Command-line interface::). This sounds to me like this GRUB feature is intended for different purpose, and the use case described here does not make much sense (unlike lowering the time-out to e.g. 1 second). Torsten, what is your view? According to the documentation, GRUB allows to display the boot menu via pushing the Escape button. #7: Christoph Thiel (cthiel1) (2009-07-16 11:27:26) (reply to #3) Torsten, could you please provide your view on this? Fedora and others seem to be doing this for years. #4: T. J. Brumfield (enderandrew) (2009-06-13 03:31:06) This option would only be utilized when no other OS is present, and you can still get back to the menu with Esc. This isn't that much different than needing F8 for the boot menu for Windows. It would speed up boot times. How is that a bad thing? #5: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-06-18 23:53:45) Does not Fedora do something similar? #6: Christoph Thiel (cthiel1) (2009-06-28 10:00:44) (reply to #5) I haven't looked at how Fedora handles this. Jan, would you be able to dig into what Fedora does technically? This would be very much appreciated! #9: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-08-09 14:38:47) (reply to #6) (Well I had hoped you know ;-) What Fedora does (or what it used to in the last years, or what other distros did/do) is that the first GRUB screen does not show the menu (it's "hidden"), but only shows it if you interrupt with a keypress: http://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers/fedora-first-boot.jpg --1st screen with "HIDDEN MENU" http://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/d/d4/Tours_Fedora9_001_Install_Boot.png -- 2nd screen And FWIW, I find that rather pointless, just show the menu, does not hurt anybody to know a bit more about one's own system. #8: Stefan Kunze (kunzes) (2009-07-28 16:03:50) The only problem I see with this is when the installer does not pick up another installed OS (happens to Windows once in a while) and defaults to a hidden Bootloader? #10: Robert Davies (robopensuse) (2009-12-10 17:53:20) GRUB2 defaults to this method. How does this speed boot time though? If you wait for the user to give them a chance to activate the Hidden menu, you actually slow things up, as they are not encouraged to hit <enter>. I think having option hidden, makes it less obvious and increases documentation and support workload, because greater need for user education. Also the kernel does not give good user feedback early in boot process, seeing menu flash up reassures end user that things are working as expected. + #11: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-12-12 14:29:27) (reply to #10) + Indeed, the switch time from the hidden state to showing the menu + entries is considerable (and part of that is because it uses VESA). + GRUB's text mode hidden feature (for serial consoles) is faster ;) -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305317