cvs commit: src/sys/boot/i386/loader Makefile loader.rc

[Robert Watson]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Scott Long wrote:

>   Disable the beastie menu.  It offends some and annoys everyone else, and I'm
>   frankly tired of the controversy.  When people ask me why FreeBSD isn't user-
>   friendly, I'll tell them that I tried.  RIP.

I thought that most of the objections I heard were to the Beastie, not the
menu, but perhaps I misunderstood...  The only technical objection I've
had to the menu is that the clear screen it issues before rendering causes
some terminal emulators to loose some scroll back, suggesting we might
want to generate a CR, 25 LF's, then pick up with the menu to push the
console contents present previously outside the area cleared.  I've seen
one or two bug reports where panic messages have been obscured as a result
of the clear screen but that's easy to work around.

FWIW, I think the menu is a very good idea, as it provides users wth an
easy option to disable ACPI and try variations on hardware probing on
i386, which sadly, is highly necessary.  Especially with the 2-4 year old
generation of machine that is typically available to "experiment with" and
suffers from the worst ACPI quirkiness. 

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research