Any Boot Animation Details?


After having worked on the bootloader and kernel a bit I think boot animations are evil and should be avoided completely, at least in the bootloader. The bootloader can't do multitasking, so playing pointless animation there will only make the whole boot time longer without gaining anything. The kernel can do multitasking, but I'd rather have it loading drivers and stuff as fast as it can instead of stopping from time to time to decode some image format and push 750kB to the framebuffer..
 
Ugh, I don't need some Prince video playing everytime I boot the thing up. It's creepy as hell!
 
notaz said:
After having worked on the bootloader and kernel a bit I think boot animations are evil and should be avoided completely, at least in the bootloader. The bootloader can't do multitasking, so playing pointless animation there will only make the whole boot time longer without gaining anything. The kernel can do multitasking, but I'd rather have it loading drivers and stuff as fast as it can instead of stopping from time to time to decode some image format and push 750kB to the framebuffer..
I bet you there will be an option to turn it off, pleasing people who like animations and people who don't!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
notaz said:
After having worked on the bootloader and kernel a bit I think boot animations are evil and should be avoided completely, at least in the bootloader.
I agree. I'd much rather have a faster boot time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You guys bring up good points. Agreed that in all, the faster the better, but on the side, if I had the choice or 3 seconds of nothing (or boot text) up against 4-5 seconds of animation, It's really a no brainer for me to choose the boot animation. I'm interested to hear what everyone's opinion on this is. In all, we have a chance to make this the coolest thing since sliced bread. I wouldn't mind a little style to ship with it
 
banjeed said:
You guys bring up good points. Agreed that in all, the faster the better, but on the side, if I had the choice or 3 seconds of nothing (or boot text) up against 4-5 seconds of animation, It's really a no brainer for me to choose the boot animation. I'm interested to hear what everyone's opinion on this is. In all, we have a chance to make this the coolest thing since sliced bread. I wouldn't mind a little style to ship with it
I think the first 3 or 4 times I would like the boot animation, after that, it would annoy me that the boot time was increased for something so pointless. I'd rather have no boot animation to make the boot up as fast as possible
 
Last edited by a moderator:
We can always see how long it takes to boot, and come up with an animation that fills that time (a very simple one).
 
nothing speaks against a fast logo .. but 1-2 sec is ok. anylonger can be annoying after some time.
 
Vorporeal said:
We can always see how long it takes to boot, and come up with an animation that fills that time (a very simple one).
The point was that the animation will prolong that boot time. For the fastest boot time, you don't show any animation.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
a little, but linux really doesn't go much faster, I mean, you will only have about 1 second max (unless your card is a class 1 or 2 or something) lag time added to the boot. But that is startup, not coming back from standby mode
 
MonkeyChops said:
how about it runs pong so we can play while we wait! :)
Reminds me of Galaga during Tekken's boot time
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Kloplop brought up a point I wanted to: It's only for _booting_, i.e. starting from a complete shutdown. The devs have said before that probably won't happen very often, because the battery's so good and the SoC has a very low-drain standby mode.
So I think it's okay to put some time into a fancy animation, because it won't be seen often (think Tapwave Zodiac, you only really saw that one when you reset it - and it was even interactive :) )
 
notaz said:
After having worked on the bootloader and kernel a bit I think boot animations are evil and should be avoided completely, at least in the bootloader. The bootloader can't do multitasking, so playing pointless animation there will only make the whole boot time longer without gaining anything. The kernel can do multitasking, but
My own bootloader can do a lot more, including sort-of proper multitasking (ie, it can do stuff whilst waiting for nand reads/etc). However, I still think that for the first Pandoras, using uboot will be more better, as its pretty much guaranteed to be more stable and offer more functionality, even though people will have to have a static image rather than an animation. It's also the standard, and so lets people hack the system easier.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top