SparkleBIOS
The jokes are true. Here is what each one checks.
Under the 1995 boot screen, SparkleBIOS runs a small health check on your machine. Every line that looks like a diagnostic is one. This page lists the three checks that ship today, what they probe, and how they stay out of your shell's way.
The three checks
| The screen says | It means |
|---|---|
Boot device order: eko-pro, sparklebios, klang-stack | The three git repositories you worked in most recently. |
Primary boot device not parked: eko-pro, 3 uncommitted changes. | You walked away from that repository mid-change. bios resume takes you back to it. |
IRQ conflict: port 3000 held by node (pid 4821) for 3 days. | A development server you forgot about is still holding a well known port. |
Virus scan: eko-pro has .env.local tracked by git. Quarantine advised. | git is tracking a file whose name looks like a secret or a key. |
Boot device order
Looks under your project roots for directories containing .git, one or two levels deep, and takes the three whose index was modified most recently. If the most recent one has any output from git status --porcelain, the boot screen names it and the number of changed lines. Both lines are informational and are kept for 16 hours.
The git calls pass --no-optional-locks. Without it, git refreshes the index as a side effect of reading it, and the probe itself would become the last thing to touch the repository it had just inspected, pinning it to the top of the list forever.
IRQ conflicts
Lists TCP listeners with lsof, keeps only the ones on a short allow list of development ports, ignores macOS system services that legitimately hold ports, and fires for the single oldest listener that has been up for at least eight hours. One line, one offender. It is a warning, kept for six hours.
Ports it looks at: 1420, 3000, 3001, 4000, 4200, 4321, 5173, 5174, 8000, 8080, 8081, 8888, 9000, 9090.
Virus scan
A secrets scan wearing a 1995 costume. It lists the files git is tracking in your recent repositories and fires for the first repository that tracks something that looks like a secret. It is the only check that reports a failure, and it is kept for 24 hours.
A file name is a hit when it is .env or starts with .env.; is one of id_rsa, id_dsa, id_ecdsa, id_ed25519, credentials.json, .netrc, .pgpass, secrets.yml or secrets.yaml; starts with service-account and ends in .json; or has an extension of pem, key, p12, pfx, keystore or jks.
Nothing slow runs while your shell starts
The boot path reads one JSON file and nothing else. All probing happens in bios refresh, a separate command that the boot spawns detached and never waits on. A slow or hanging probe cannot slow a shell down. Measured on an Apple M3 Pro, a whole boot takes 4 to 6ms including process start.
Still to come
A disk filling up, a changed .zshrc, stashes you forgot, a slow shell and a low battery. Each will follow the same rule: the line is funny, and the line is true.