I don't think anyone will be pointing a gun at your head forcing you
to install a no-icky-text-here graphical bootup [1].
The big problem I can see with a no-icky-text-here (NITH in the
future) is where to store the image. I think that the code to flip a
(PC) console into graphics mode would be fairly small (all the
EGA/VGA references spend a lot of time warning you that many of these
registers are write-only and it would be a bad thing to fuck with
them in a multitasking system. But during bootup it's not a concern,
as long as you get get back to text mode when you're done or some
horrible error happens[2].) but the image looks like it will be 16k
or so, and at least in my application (McAfee Webshield) I'm already
pushing up against the limits of a zImage and don't want to
completely eat up the disk with a huge bzImage, PARTICULARLY when
it's stuff that's only used once and then forgotten.
[1 but I *do* want to point a gun at the head of the commercial world,
and if that gun is a NITH kernel loader, it's a minor price to
pay so I can continue to be paid for doing Linux development.]
[2 I get back to text mode when something horrible happens by modifying
panic so that it resets the video to allegedly sane defaults just
before it halts the system.]
____
david parsons \bi/ orc@pell.chi.il.us
\/