The main goal of this project is to improve overall bootloader quality of life and user experience.
I quantify quality of life/user experience based on the idea that the “ideal” bootloader experience (for a large majority of users) is one where they boot/exit as quickly as possible.
For example, if a cat walks over the keyboard at the wrong time, a plain “OK” prompt is more likely to make someone unfamiliar hit the reset button than type “autoboot”. Like a solid number of quality of life snags, this has an easy fix, but there's many situations like it which all contribute to the greater problem.
Lots of hands-on testing and trying to break things.
While the cat example is not very serious, it shows my general thought process. If there's a mistake which is easy to make, it should be easy to fix.
This list is not concrete, since I am expanding as I find more rough edges, however, the loader prompt changes are the core focus.
Loader prompt:
Everything else:
The schedule below has been updated to reflect this.
history command)Generally, the only option is smoke-tests. “does the bootloader work” isn't a very complicated question, so my testing boils down to booting on as many VMs/configurations as possible.
This testing is manual, but I expect I'll get sick of it and end up automating it at some point.
Number of times I've forgotten DESTDIR= and accidentally “tested” changes on my host machine: 3.
These are just links I find useful, not background info/related work.
https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_9_2021_03_18.pdf