On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 05:51:38 +0800, Antonino A. Daplas
[off-list ref] wrote:

Yes, that is the downside to a userspace solution. How bad will that be?
Note that Jon Smirl is proposing a temporary console driver for early
boot messages until the primary console driver activates.

Does anyone know exactly how big the window is from when a compiled in
console activates until one that relies on initramfs loads? I don't
think it is very big given that a lot of the early printk's are queued
before they are displayed.

Other than embedded systems, are there machines that have no BIOS/PROM
display at all and rely entirely on a bootable kernel for display? If
so, how do machines like this put up a message that they can't find
the kernel? How do you get hardware diagnostic messages from them?

In the case of something like a Mac you would want to keep the display
blank until the early user space code initializes the display in
graphics mode. Only if you get a fatal error before this would you
dump the info using the Open Firmware display. Same strategy would
apply to x86.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@gmail.com