On Saturday 16 October 2004 07:20, Jon Smirl wrote:

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 05:51:38 +0800, Antonino A. Daplas

[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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.

There's a log of initialization that goes on between console_init() and
populate_rootfs().  However, console_init() will only initialize built-in
consoles (as pointed to by conswitchp) such as vgacon or dummycon.
However, the framebuffer system initialization does happen after
populate_rootfs().  

So, at least in the framebuffer perspective, the emulator/video boot may be
loaded as part of initramfs.

Tony