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From: Paul Brook <paul@codesourcery.com>
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 0/3] Add BIOS splash image support
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:18:57 +0000
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To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org, "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>
Cc: Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>, bochs developers <bochs-developers@lists.sourceforge.net>, kvm developers <kvm@vger.kernel.org>

> > Modern BIOSes have splash screens.  I don't see why our BIOS shouldn't
> > have one too.
>
> Crap PC BIOSes have splash screens because they're horribly slow
> and otherwise printing lots of irrelevant scary junk at users. The
> best BIOS 'splash' screen is one which never appears unless there
> is a boot failure, and gets control to the OS as quickly as possible.
> IMHO a better goal is reducing the time until the OS / bootloader is
> able to take over all management of the display.

I agree. The qemu bios init process takes almost no time.

The only reason it takes a noticeable amount of time is that we have a 
deliberate delay in there to allow the user to access the boot menu.
I'm not convinced this menu is actually very useful in practice, It's 
something that should probably be delegated to your management utility and/or 
be optional.

Paul