[ge-talk] Get login details while booting.

[Truls Becken]

>>>> If the OS takes 10 seconds to boot fully, but the login screen is
>>>> up in 5 seconds then the user will feel it is a 5 second boot.
>>>
>>> I agree.
>>
> There is a bigger picture - the slowest part of UI is "U" - the user. If
> system takes to boot 10 seconds and login screen popsup at the first second
> then by the time user finished typing it's login the system is already up
> and ready.

Yes, that is the whole point. Although the example with 10 and 5
seconds wasn't as optimistic as what one could expect if the login
prompt was part of the boot screen. There are at least two different
levels of speediness one could aim for. The fastest is a prompt on the
boot screen, but as already mentioned, I'm not so sure this is
feasible, we will see. The alternative is simply to make an effort to
bring up the "real" login panel as fast as possible.

>> The original suggestion, however, was somewhat more innovative. Mat
>> mentioned a login box at the boot screen and reading name/password
>> before even bringing up the boot fs. This means that the user
>> interface would be part of the kernel, which should also mean that you
>> can start typing with no delay whatsoever.
>>
>> Technical issues aside, how would one make this work in practice?
>
> That's the funniest question about any piece of software not just OS kernel
> I've ever seen so far.
> Please, I know that haiku is supposed to be fun but this is more like "VP of
> technology" type of fun.

What exactly do you find so funny? I guess it was a bad choice of
words on my part. At this point, Mat wanted to discuss the
psychological and other human aspects of the interface, without
getting hung up in technical limitations. At least that was how I
understood his follow up post.

By "how would one make this work in practice?" I did not mean on a
technical level. What I was referring to was the possible usability
issues, such as the user being cut off from typing when the boot
screen disappears, or what to do if the first login attempt fails.

> Personally, I am not involved with kernel development but it seems to me
> that if instead of a buffer for command line space the kernel would allocate
> a space for 640x480x16 framebuffer that would not be really "user interface
> as part of the kernel" problem. It's not dramatically different from BeOS
> boot screen - graphic logo and 5 circles changing colors as boot process
> goes. It was waiting for user input as well - if you'd hit F1 at the right
> moment it would run debug output to serial port. All it needs is a little
> bit more elaborated keyboard handler to hide the password.

Yes, this was what the original poster noted as well.

> The appserver would then just wait lazily in the background until user logs
> in to do take over framebuffer - switch from standard VGA to whatever
> GeForce you have.

Ok.

> The more challenging task is to turn boot screen into
> welcome screen a la Windows XP. My 6 years old really likes it and to me it
> means "user friendly" even if it "works MS way" - 3 out o 4 times it would
> lock up. It's not that it was invented by MS - SGI Irix had it long ago and
> it had that "cool Unix" style.
> The only way I can imagine to make boot welcome screen with "user+image"
> list at the earliest possible stage is to make a bitmap image at previous
> shutdown and save it on the disk at predefined location. 640x480x16 would
> occupy 960 blocks (512 bytes) although images at this resolution would look
> ugly. Any better ideas ?

If you want a list of users with avatars displayed next to them, I
think it's getting too complicated to do on the boot screen. Even
without the images, the list of users could not be displayed before
the boot volume is mounted.

> This "logon at boot time prompt" raises another problem - the login prompt
> has to be consistent, it should look exactly the same when system boots up
> (appserver is cranking up) and when user just logged off without shutting
> system down (appserver is in full swing).

This was one of the issues I mentioned earlier, but why does it have
to look identical? If that's a requirement, I think it's better to let
the appserver come up first.