4 ms·

One of the most annoying "dropped input" problems for me is in the Linux (GNOME's?) locking screen. To unlock the machine you need press e.g. Space to get the p

One of the most annoying "dropped input" problems for me is in the Linux (GNOME's?) locking screen. To unlock the machine you need press e.g. Space to get the password entry textbox to appear and focused on, then type in the password and the press Enter — that's all fine. However, after locking the screen, the monitor powers down, and so the first keypress turns the monitor back on and then only after some delay it puts focus to the password entry textbox. That means that if I go to my machine and rapidly type "Spacebar, hunter42, Enter", about 2 or 3 first characters of my password are ignored, and I get a "wrong password!" notification — again, after some delay because preventing on-site brute-forcing is important. Constrast that with pressing F11, two arrows down to pick the correct OS, Enter, in quick succession during the boot, before the monitor boots up and starts showing the info (for some reason, this monitor I use takes about much time to boot up as the computer itself) — this has never failed me yet because apparently the bootloaders don't just throw the keyboard events away.

atoav 3y ago
The delay is important for increasing security, but then why not have it after the check?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > The delay is important for increasing security, but then why not have it after the check? It really isn't on a local machine, when the keyboard is used to enter the password manually. There should be zero delay. 0 ms. That'd be acceptable. And some system can be configured to "no delay" before successive password attempts. If one really believes adding a delay locally helps, the only thing that makes sense is introducing a delay after several broken attempts (like, say, five attempts: 10 seconds delay). But security theatre by having a 3 second delay between two login attempts is ridiculous.
ben-schaaf 3y ago
Are you sure the delay before the input box is focused is not just the computer waking from sleep? I have the same thing on my desktop - need to press a key to wake it up. On my laptop that wakes when the lid opens I can just type the password, not even a key to get past the lock screen.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  I don't think it is? I normally turn all the power-saving stuff off, but it could have come back. In any case, the keyboards do have buffer to hold several keypresses, so I believe what happens is that the event loop kicks in, reads those keypresses, and dispatches them into the void; the booting stuff, on the other hand, only polls the keyboard when it's going to act on it.

atoav 3y ago

The delay is important for increasing security, but then why not have it after the check?

TacticalCoder 3y ago
> The delay is important for increasing security, but then why not have it after the check? It really isn't on a local machine, when the keyboard is used to enter the password manually. There should be zero delay. 0 ms. That'd be acceptable. And some system can be configured to "no delay" before successive password attempts. If one really believes adding a delay locally helps, the only thing that makes sense is introducing a delay after several broken attempts (like, say, five attempts: 10 seconds delay). But security theatre by having a 3 second delay between two login attempts is ridiculous.

ben-schaaf 3y ago

Are you sure the delay before the input box is focused is not just the computer waking from sleep? I have the same thing on my desktop - need to press a key to wake it up. On my laptop that wakes when the lid opens I can just type the password, not even a key to get past the lock screen.

Joker_vD 3y ago
I don't think it is? I normally turn all the power-saving stuff off, but it could have come back. In any case, the keyboards do have buffer to hold several keypresses, so I believe what happens is that the event loop kicks in, reads those keypresses, and dispatches them into the void; the booting stuff, on the other hand, only polls the keyboard when it's going to act on it.