[PATCH 0/4] Make hidden menu really hidden

[Hans de Goede]

Hi All,

Let me start with a quick self-intro:

I'm a FOSS enthusiast / developer working for Red Hat, my latest project
at Red Hat is chasing what has over the years become the magical unicorn
of desktop Linux distros: a smooth graphical boot where the machine goes
from the BIOS screen to the graphical login manager in one smooth flow,
without any (80x25) text mode messages or black-screens in between.

These 4 patches modify grub so that when timeout_style=hidden is used,
and the user does not press a key to show the menu the EFI display is never
switched to text mode and the vendor logo stays in place on the monitor.

The first patch adds a new "version" command, this is not really related
to the other 3 patches, but when I started working on grub I wanted to
verify I was running my own build and I was surprised there was no such
command, so I added one.

The second patch is also only somewhat related, if the menu-timeout is
short, one way to still make sure you get the grub menu is to start
pressing the ESC key before grub is loaded, but on some systems ESC is
the hotkey to enter the firmware setup, so this commit also adds support
for pressing F8 to ge the menu. F8 is used by the Windows boot menu, so
almost all x86 firmwares don't use this key for their own purposes. This
will also make it easier for users coming from Windows to get the menu
(if they know that F8 is used for the boot menu Windows).

The third patch makes changes which a lot of distros have been carrying
as distro patches since 2013 at least, these changes make grub be quiet
during boot, except for the menu. These changes were not universally liked
in the past, because they may make debugging boot problems harder in some
cases, so they have never been merged.

This version of these changes makes the quiet behavior configurable
through a ./configure option which defaults to the old verbose behavior,
which should hopefully make everyone happy. This patch is a mix of Fedora
and Ubuntu patches for this, picking the best of both.

The fourth patch modifies the EFI terminal code to not switch the EFI
display to textmode until the first text is output. Note that for this
patch to actually make a difference, no text must be output, so we need
the "quiet" patch to be enabled and timeout_style=hidden. If any error
(or other output happens) grub will immediately switch to text mode and
show the message to the user.

Regards,

Hans